THe    DRH/AK 


HENRY   IRVING 


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THE   DRAMA 


The  drama 

Addresses  by 

Henry  Irving 

I.  The  Stage  as  it  is 
II.  The  Art  of  Acting 

III.  Four  Great  Actors 

IV.  The  Art  of  Acting 

WITH  A  FRONTISPIECE  BY  WHISTLER 


NEW  YORK 

TAIT,  SONS  &  COMPANY 
Union  Square 


Copyright,  1892,  by 
United  States  Book  Company 

[All  rights  reserved'^ 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The  Stage  as  it  is 9 

The  Art  of  Acting  ....  49 

Four  Great  Actors     ....  107 

The  Art  of  Acting  .     ...  173 


LECTURE 

SESSIONAL  OPENING 

PHILOSOPHICAL  INSTITUTION 

EDINBURGH 

8  NOVEMBER 
1881 


THE    STAGE     AS     IT     IS. 


Ladies  and  Gentlemen, 

OU  will  not  be  surprised 
'that,  on  this  interesting  oc- 
casion, I  have  selected  as 
the  subject  of  the  few  re- 
marks I  propose  to  offer  you, 
"The  Stage  as  it  is."  The 
stage — because  to  my  pro- 
fession I  owe  it  that  I  am  here,  and  every 
dictate  of  taste  and  of  fidelity  impels  me  to 
honor  it ;  the  stage  as  it  is — because  it  is 
very  cheap  and  empty  honor  that  is  paid 
to  the  drama  in  the  abstract,  and  withheld 
from  the  theatre  as  a  working  institution 
in  our  midst.  Fortunately  there  is  less  of 
this  than  there  used  to  be.  It  arose  partly 
from  intellectual  superciliousness,  partly 

9 


THE      STAGE     AS     IT     IS 

from  timidity  as  to  moral  contamination. 
To  boast  of  being  able  to  appreciate 
Shakespeare  more  in  reading  him  than  in 
seeing  him  acted  used  to  be  a  common 
method  of  affecting  special  intellectuality. 
I  hope  this  delusion — a  gross  and  pitiful 
one  as  to  most  of  us — has  almost  abso- 
lutely died  out.  It  certainly  conferred  a 
very  cheap  badge  of  superiority  on  those 
who  entertained  it.  It  seemed  to  each 
of  them  an  inexpensive  opportunity  of 
worshipping  himself  on  a  pedestal.  But 
what  did  it  amount  to?  It  was  little 
more  than  a  conceited  and  feather-headed 
assumption  that  an  unprepared  reader, 
whose  mind  is  usually  full  of  far  other 
things,  will  see  on  the  instant  all  that 
has  been  developed  in  hundreds  of  years 
by  the  members  of  a  studious  and  enthu- 
siastic profession.  My  own  conviction 
is,  that  there  are  few  characters  or  pas- 
sages of  our  great  dramatists  which  will 
not  repay  original  study.     But  at  least 

lO 


THE      STAGE     AS      IT      IS 

we  must  recognize  the  vast  advantages 
with  which  a  practised  actor,  impregnated 
by  the  associations  of  his  Hfe,  and  by 
study — with  all  the  practical  and  critical 
skill  of  his  profession  up  to  the  date  at 
which  he  appears,  whether  he  adopts  or 
rejects  tradition — addresses  himself  to  the 
interpretation  of  any  great  character,  even 
if  he  have  no  originality  whatever.  There 
is  something  still  more  than  this,  how- 
ever, in  acting.  Every  one  who  has  the 
smallest  histrionic  gift  has  a  natural  dra- 
matic fertility ;  so  that  as  soon  as  he 
knows  the  author's  text,  and  obtains  self- 
possession,  and  feels  at  home  in  a  part 
without  being  too  familiar  with  it,  the 
mere  automatic  action  of  rehearsing  and 
playing  it  at  once  begins  to  place  the 
author  in  new  lights,  and  to  give  the  per- 
sonage being  played  an  individuality 
partly  independent  of,  and  yet  consistent 
with,  and  rendering  more  powerfully 
visible,  the  dramatist's  conception.     It  is 

II 


THE     STAGE     AS      IT      IS 

the  vast  power  a  good  actor  has  in  this 
way  which  has  led  the  French  to  speak 
of  creating  a  part  when  they  mean  its 
being  first  played  ;  and  French  authors 
are  so  conscious  of  the  extent  and  value 
of  this  co-operation  of  actors  with  them, 
that  they  have  never  objected  to  the 
phrase,  but,  on  the  contrary,  are  uni- 
formly lavish  in  their  homage  to  the 
artists  who  have  created  on  the  boards 
the  parts  which  they  themselves  have 
created  on  paper. 

I  must  add,  as  an  additional  reason  for 
valuing  the  theatre,  that  while  there  is 
only  one  Shakespeare,  and  while  there 
are  comparatively  few  dramatists  who 
are  sufficiently  classic  to  be  read  with 
close  attention,  there  is  a  great  deal  of 
average  dramatic  work  excellently  suited 
for  representation.  From  this  the  public 
derive  pleasure.  From  this  they  receive 
— as  from  fiction  in  literature — a  great 
deal  of  instruction  and  mental  stimulus. 

12 


THE      STAGE     AS      IT      IS 

Some  may  be  worldly,  some  social,  some 
cynical,  some  merely  humorous  and 
witty,  but  a  great  deal  of  it,  though  its 
literary  merit  is  secondary,  is  well  quali- 
fied to  bring  out  all  that  is  most  fruitful 
of  good  in  common  sympathies.  Now,  it 
is  plain  that  if,  because  Shakespeare  is 
good  reading,  people  were  to  give  the 
cold  shoulder  to  the  theatre,  the  world 
would  lose  all  the  vast  advantage  which 
comes  to  it  through  the  dramatic  faculty 
in  forms  not  rising  to  essentially  literary 
excellence.  As  respects  the  other  feeling 
which  used  to  stand  more  than  it  does 
now  in  the  way  of  the  theatre — the  fear 
of  moral  contamination — it  is  due  to  the 
theatre  of  our  day,  on  the  one  hand,  and 
to  the  prejudices  of  our  grandfathers  on 
the  other,  to  confess  that  the  theatre  of 
fifty  years  ago  or  less  did  need  reforming 
in  the  audience  part  of  the  house.  All 
who  have  read  the  old  controversy  as  to 
the  morality  of  going  to  the  theatre  are 

13 


THE      STAGE     AS      IT      IS 

familiar  with  the  objection  to  which  I 
refer.  But  the  theatre  of  fifty  years  ago 
or  less  was  reformed.  If  there  are  any, 
therefore,  as  I  fear  there  are  a  few,  who 
still  talk  on  this  point  in  the  old  vein,  let 
them  rub  their  eyes  a  bit,  and  do  us  the 
justice  to  consider  not  what  used  to  be, 
but  what  is.  But  may  there  be  moral 
contamination  from  what  is  performed 
on  the  stage  ?  Well,  there  may  be.  But 
so  there  is  from  books.  So  there  may  be 
at  lawn  tennis  clubs.  So  there  may  be 
at  dances.  So  there  may  be  in  connec- 
tion with  everything  in  civilized  life  and 
society.  But  do  we  therefore  bury  our- 
selves? The  anchorites  secluded  them- 
selves in  hermitages.  The  Puritans  iso- 
lated themselves  in  consistent  abstinence 
from  everything  that  anybody  else  did. 
And  there  are  people  now  who  think  that 
they  can  keep  their  children,  and  that 
those  children  will  keep  themselves  in 
after  life,  in  cotton  wool,  so  as  to  avoid 
14 


THE      STAGE     AS      IT      IS 

all  temptation  of  body  and  mind,  and  be 
saved  nine-tenths  of  the  responsibility  of 
self-control.  All  this  is  mere  phantasy. 
You  must  be  in  the  world,  though  you 
need  not  be  of  it ;  and  the  best  way  to 
make  the  world  a  better  community  to 
be  in,  and  not  so  bad  a  place  to  be  of,  is 
not  to  shun,  but  to  bring  public  opinion 
to  bear  upon  its  pursuits  and  its  relaxa- 
tions. Depend  upon  two  things — that 
the  theatre,  as  a  whole,  is  never  below  the 
average  moral  sense  of  the  time  ;  and 
that  the  inevitable  demand  for  an  admix- 
ture, at  least,  of  wholesome  sentiment  in 
every  sort  of  dramatic  production  brings 
the  ruling  tone  of  the  theatre,  whatever 
drawback  may  exist,  up  to  the  highest 
level  at  which  the  general  morality  of 
the  time  can  truly  be  registered.  -We 
may  be  encouraged  by  the  reflection  that 
this  is  truer  than  ever  it  was  before, 
owing  to  the  greater  spread  of  educa- 
tion, the  increased  community  of  taste 

IS 


THE     STAGE     AS     IT     IS 

between  classes,  and  the  almost  absolute 
divorce  of  the  stage  from  mere  wealth 
and  aristocracy.  Wealth  and  aristocracy 
come  around  the  stage  in  abundance,  and 
are  welcome,  as  in  the  time  of  Elizabeth  ; 
but  the  stage  is  no  longer  a  mere  append- 
age of  court -life,  no  longer  a  mere  mirror 
of  patrician  vice  hanging  at  the  girdle  of 
fashionable  profligacy  as  it  was  in  the 
days  of  Congreve  and  Wycherley.  It  is 
now  the  property  of  the  educated  people. 
It  has  to  satisfy  them  or  pine  in  neglect 
And  the  better  their  demands  the  better 
will  be  the  supply  with  which  the  drama 
will  respond.  This  being  not  only  so, 
but  seen  to  be  so,  the  stage  is  no  longer 
proscribed.  It  is  no  longer  under  a  ban. 
Its  members  are  no  longer  pariahs  in 
society.  They  live  and  bear  their  social 
part  like  others — as  decorously  observant 
of  all  that  makes  the  sweet  sanctities 
of  life — as  gracefully  cognizant  of  its 
amenities — as  readily  recognized  and 
i6 


THE     STAGE     AS      IT     IS 

welcomed  as  the  members  of  any  other 
profession.  Am  I  not  here  your  grateful 
guest,  opening  the  session  of  this  philo- 
sophical and  historic  institution  ?  I  who 
am  simply  an  actor,  an  interpreter,  with 
such  gifts  as  I  have,  and  such  thought 
as  I  can  bestow,  of  stage  plays.  And 
am  I  not  received  here  with  perfect 
cordiality  on  an  equality,  not  hungrily 
bowing  and  smirking  for  patronage,  but 
interchanging  ideas  which  I  am  glad 
to  express,  and  which  you  listen  to  as 
thoughtfully  and  as  kindly  as  you  would 
to  those  of  any  other  student,  any  other 
man  who  had  won  his  way  into  such 
prominence  as  to  come  under  the  ken 
of  a  distinguished  institution  such  as 
that  which  I  have  the  honor  to  address  ? 
I  do  not  mince  the  matter  as  to  my 
personal  position  here,  because  I  feel 
it  is  a  representative  one,  and  marks 
an  epoch  in  the  estimation  in  which 
the  art   I   love  is    held  by  the   British 

17 


THE     STAGE     AS     IT     IS 

world  You  have  had  many  distin- 
guished men  here,  and  their  themes 
have  often  been  noble,  but  with  which 
of  those  themes  has  not  my  art  imme- 
morial and  perpetual  associations  ?  Is  it 
not  for  ever  identified  with  the  noblest 
instincts  and  occupations  of  the  human 
mind  ?  If  I  think  of  poetry,  must  I  not 
remember  how  to  the  measure  of  its 
lofty  music  the  theatre  has  in  almost  all 
ages  set  the  grandest  of  dramatic  con- 
ceptions ?  If  I  think  of  literature,  must  I 
not  recall  that  of  all  the  amusements  by 
which  men  in  various  states  of  society 
have  solaced  their  leisure  and  refreshed 
their  energies,  the  acting  of  plays  is  the 
one  that  has  never  yet,  even  for  a  day, 
been  divorced  from  literary  taste  and 
skill  ?  If  I  meditate  on  patriotism,  can  I 
but  reflect  how  grandly  the  boards  have 
been  trod  by  personifications  of  heroic 
love  of  country  ?  There  is  no  subject 
of  human  thought  that  by  common  con- 
iS 


THE     STAGE     AS     IT     IS 

sent  is  deemed  ennobling  that  has  not  ere 
now,  and  from  period  to  period,  been 
illustrated  in  the  bright  vesture,  and 
received  expression  from  the  glowing  lan- 
guage of  theatrical  representation.  And 
surely  it  is  fit  that,  remembering  what  the 
stage  has  been  and  must  be,  I  should  ac- 
knowledge eagerly  and  gladly  that,  with 
few  exceptions,  the  public  no  longer  de- 
bar themselves  from  the  profitable  pleas- 
ures of  the  theatre,  and  no  longer  brand 
with  any  social  stigma  the  professors  of 
the  histrionic  art.  Talking  to  an  eminent 
bishop  one  day,  I  said  to  him,  "Now, 
my  Lord,  why  is  it,  with  your  love  and 
knowledge  of  the  drama,  with  your  deep 
interest  in  the  stage  and  all  its  belongings, 
and  your  wide  sympathy  with  all  that 
ennobles  and  refines  our  natures — why 
is  it  that  you  never  go  to  the  theatre  ? " 
"Well,"  said  he,  "I'll  tell  you.  I'm 
afraid  of  the  Rock  and  the  Record.'^  I 
hope  soon  we  shall  relieve  even  the  most 

»9 


THE      STAGE     AS      IT     IS 

timid  bishop — and  my  right  reverend 
friend  is  not  the  most  timid — of  all  fears 
and  tremors  whatever  that  can  prevent 
even  ministers  of  religion  from  recogniz- 
ing the  wisdom  of  the  change  of  view 
which  has  come  over  even  the  most  fas- 
tidious public  opinion  on  this  question. 
Remember,  if  you  please,  that  the  hos- 
tile public  opinion  which  has  lately  be- 
gun so  decisively  to  disappear,  has  been 
of  comparatively  modern  growth,  or  at 
least  revival.  The  pious  and  learned  of 
other  times  gave  their  countenance  and 
approbation  to  the  stage  of  their  days, 
as  the  pious  and  learned  of  our  time 
give  their  countenance  and  approbation 
to  certain  performances  in  this  day. 
Welcome  be  the  return  of  good  sense, 
good  taste,  and  charity,  or  rather  justice. 
No  apology  for  the  stage.  None  is 
needed.  It  has  but  to  be  named  to  be 
honored.  Too  long  the  world  talked 
with  bated  breath  and  whispering  hum- 
20 


THE     STAGE     AS     IT     IS 

bleness  of  ' '  the  poor  player. "  There  are 
now  few  poor  players.  Whatever  variety 
of  fortune  and  merit  there  may  be  among 
them,  they  have  the  same  degrees  of 
prosperity  and  respect  as  come  to  mem- 
bers of  other  avocations.  There  never 
was  so  large  a  number  of  theatres  or  of 
actors.  And  their  type  is  vastly  im- 
proved by  public  recognition.  The  old 
days  when  good-for-nothings  passed  into 
the  profession  are  at  an  end  ;  and  the 
old  Bohemian  habits,  so  far  as  they  were 
evil  and  disreputable,  have  also  disap- 
peared. The  ranks  of  the  art  are  being 
continually  recruited  by  deeply  inter- 
ested and  earnest  young  men  of  good  edu- 
cation and  belongings.  Nor  let  us,  while 
dissipating  the  remaining  prejudices  of 
outsiders,  give  quarter  to  those  which 
linger  among  players  themselves.  There 
are  some  who  acknowledge  the  value  of 
improved  status  to  themselves  and  their 
art,  but  who  lament  that  there  are  now 

21 


THE     STAGE     AS     IT      IS 

no  schools  for  actors.  This  is  a  very- 
idle  lamentation.  Every  actor  in  full 
employment  gets  plenty  of  schooling, 
for  the  best  schooling  is  practice,  and 
there  is  no  school  so  good  as  a  well- 
conducted  playhouse.  The  truth  is,  that 
the  cardinal  secret  of  success  in  acting  are 
found  within,  while  practice  is  the  surest 
way  of  fertilizing  these  germs.  To  effi- 
ciency in  the  art  of  acting  there  should 
come  a  congregation  of  fine  qualities. 
There  should  be  considerable,  though  not 
necessarily  systematic,  culture.  There 
should  be  delicate  instincts  of  taste 
cultivated,  consciously,  or  unconscious- 
ly, to  a  degree  of  extreme  and  subtle 
nicety.  There  should  be  a  power,  at 
once  refined  and  strong,  of  both  per- 
ceiving and  expressing  to  others  the  sig- 
nificance of  language,  so  that  neither 
shades  nor  masses  of  meaning,  so  to 
speak,  may  be  either  lost  or  exaggerated. 
Above  all,  there  should  be  a  sincere  and 

22 


THE     STAGE     AS     IT     IS 

abounding  sympathy  with  all  that  is  good 
and  great  and  inspiring.  That  sympathy, 
most  certainly,  must  be  under  the  control 
and  manipulation  of  art,  but  it  must  be 
none  the  lest  real  and  generous,  and  the 
artist  who  is  a  mere  artist  will  stop  short 
of  the  highest  moral  effects  of  his  craft, 
Little  of  this  can  be  got  in  a  mere  train- 
ing school,  but  all  of  it  will  come  forth 
more  or  less  fully  armed  from  the  actor's 
brain  in  the  process  of  learning  his  art  by 
practice.  For  the  way  to  learn  to  do  a 
thing  is  to  do  it  ;  and  in  learning  to  act 
by  acting,  though  there  is  plenty  of  inci- 
dental hard  drill  and  hard  work,  there  is 
nothing  commonplace  or  unfruitful. 

What  is  true  of  the  art  is  true  also  ot 
the  social  life  of  the  artist.  No  sensa- 
tional change  has  been  found  neces- 
sary to  alter  his  status  though  great 
changes  have  come.  The  stage  has 
literally  lived  down  the  rebuke  and  re- 
proach under  which  it  formerly  cowered, 

23 


THE      STAGE     AS      IT      IS 

while  its  professors  have  been  simul- 
taneously livings  down  the  prejudices 
which  excluded  them  from  society.  The 
stage  is  now  seen  to  be  an  elevating  in- 
stead of  a  lowering  influence  on  national 
morality,  and  actors  and  actresses  re- 
ceive in  society,  as  do  the  members  of 
other  professions,  exactly  the  treatment 
which  is  earned  by  their  personal  con- 
duct. And  so  I  would  say  of  what  we 
sometimes  hear  so  much  about — drama- 
tic reform.  It  is  not  needed  ;  or,  if  it  is, 
all  the  reform  that  is  wanted  will  be 
best  effected  by  the  operation  of  public 
opinion  upon  the  administration  of  a 
good  theatre.  That  is  the  true  reforming 
agency,  with  this  great  advantage,  that 
reforms  which  come  by  public  opinion 
are  sure,  while  those  which  come  with- 
out public  opinion  cannot  be  relied  upon. 
The  dramatic  reformers  are  very  well- 
meaning  people.  They  show  great  en- 
thusiasm. They  are  new  converts  to 
24 


THE      STAGE     AS      IT      IS 

the  theatre,  most  of  them,  and  they  have 
the  zeal  of  converts.  But  it  is  scarcely 
according  to  knowledge.  These  ladies 
and  gentlemen  have  scarcely  studied  the 
conditions  of  theatrical  enterprise,  which 
must  be  carried  on  as  a  business  or  it 
will  fail  as  an  art.  It  is  an  unwelcome, 
if  not  an  unwarrantable  intrusion  to 
come  among  our  people  with  elaborate 
advice,  and  endeavor  to  make  them  live 
after  different  fashions  from  those  which 
are  suitable  to  them,  and  it  will  be  quite 
hopeless  to  attempt  to  induce  the  general 
body  of  a  purely  artistic  class  to  make 
louder  and  more  fvissy  professions  of 
virtue  and  religion  than  other  people. 
In  fact,  it  is  a  downright  insult  to  the 
dramatic  profession  to  exact  or  to  ex- 
pect any  such  thing.  Equally  objec- 
tionable, and  equally  impracticable,  are 
the  attempts  of  Quixotic  "dramatic  re- 
formers" to  exercise  a  sort  of  goody- 
goody    censorship    over    the    selection 

25 


THE     STAGE     AS      IT     IS 

and  the  text  of  the  plays  to  be  acted. 
The  stage  has  been  serving  the  world 
for  hundreds,  yes,  and  thousands  of  years, 
during  which  it  has  contributed  in  pure 
dramaturgy  to  the  literature  of  the  world 
its  very  greatest  master-pieces  in  near- 
ly all  languages,  meanwhile  affording 
to  the  million  an  infinity  of  pleasure, 
all  more  or  less  innocent.  Where  less 
innocent,  rather  than  more,  the  cause 
has  lain,  not  in  the  stage,  but  in  the  state 
of  society  of  which  it  was  the  mirror. 
For  though  the  stage  is  not  always  oc- 
cupied with  its  own  period,  the  new  plays 
produced  always  reflect  in  many  particu- 
lars the  spirit  of  the  age  in  which  they  are 
played.  There  is  a  story  of  a  traveller 
who  put  up  for  the  night  at  a  certain  inn, 
on  the  door  of  which  was  the  inscription 
—  "Good  entertainment  for  man  and 
beast. "  His  horse  was  taken  to  the  stable 
and  well  cared  for,  and  he  sat  down  to 
dine.  When  the  covers  were  removed  he 
26 


THE     STAGE     AS     IT      IS 

remarked,  on  seeing  his  own  sorry  fare, 
' '  Yes,  this  is  very  well ;  but  where 's  the 
entertainment  for  the  man  ? "  If  every- 
thing were  banished  from  the  stage  ex- 
cept that  which  suits  a  certain  taste,  what 
dismal  places  our  theatres  would  be  1 
However  fond  the  play-goer  may  be  of 
tragedy,  if  you  offer  him  nothing  but 
horrors,  he  may  well  ask — "  Where's 
the  entertainment  for  the  man  who 
wants  an  evening's  amusement  ?  "  The 
humor  of  a  farce  may  not  seem  over- 
refined  to  a  particular  class  of  intelli- 
gence ;  but  there  are  thousands  of  people 
who  take  an  honest  pleasure  in  it.  And 
who,  afterseeingmy  old  friend  J.  L.  Toole 
in  some  of  his  famous  parts,  and  having 
laughed  till  their  sides  ached,  have  hot 
left  the  theatre  more  buoyant  and  light- 
hearted  than  they  came  ?  Well,  if  the 
stage  has  been  thus  useful  and  successful 
all  these  centuries,  and  still  is  productive  ; 
if  the  noble  fascination   of  the  theatre 

27 


THE     STAGE     AS      IT      IS 

draws  to  it,  as  we  know  that  it  does,  an 
immortal  poet  such  as  our  Tennyson, 
whom,  I  can  testify  from  my  own  expe- 
rience, nothing  dehghts  more  than  the 
success  of  one  of  the  plays  which,  in  the 
mellow  autumn  of  his  genius,  he  has  con- 
tributed to  the  acting  theatre  ;  if  a  great 
artist  like  Tadema  is  proud  to  design  scenes 
for  stage  plays  ;  if  in  all  departments  of 
stage  production  we  see  great  talent,  and 
in  nearly  every  instance  great  good  taste 
and  sincere  sympathy  with  the  best 
popular  ideals  of  goodness  ;  then,  I  say, 
the  stage  is  entitled  to  be  let  alone — that  is, 
it  is  entitled  to  make  its  own  bargain  with 
the  public  without  the  censorious  inter- 
vention of  well-intentioned  busybodies. 
These  do  not  know  what  to  ban  or  to 
bless.  If  they  had  their  way,  as  of  course 
they  cannot,  they  would  license,  with 
many  flourishes  and  much  self-laudation, 
a  number  of  pi^eces  which  would  be  hope- 
lessly condemned  on  the  first  hearing,  and 
28 


THE     STAGE     AS     IT     IS 

they  would  lay  an  embargo  for  very  in- 
sufficient reasons  on  many  plays  well  en- 
titled to  success.  It  is  not  in  this  direc- 
tion that  we  must  look  for  any  improve- 
ment that  is  needed  in  the  purveying  of 
material  for  the  stage.  Believe  me,  the 
right  direction  is  public  criticism  and  pub- 
lic discrimination,  I  say  so  because,  be- 
yond question,  the  public  will  have  what 
they  want.  So  far,  that  managers  in  their 
discretion,  or  at  their  pleasure,  can  force 
on  the  public  either  very  good  or  very  bad 
dramatic  material  is  an  utter  delusion. 
They  have  no  such  power.  If  they  had 
the  will  they  could  only  force  any  par- 
ticular sort  of  entertainment  just  as  long 
as  they  had  capital  to  expend  without  any 
return.  But  they  really  have  not  the  will. 
They  follow  the  public  taste  with  the 
greatest  keenness.  If  the  people  want 
Shakespeare — as  I  am  happy  to  say  they 
do,  at  least  at  one  theatre  in  London,  and 
at  all  the  great  theatres  out  of  London, 

29 


THE     STAGE     AS     IT     IS 

to  an  extent  unprecedented  in  the  history 
of  the  stage — then  they  get  Shakespeare. 
If  they  want  our  modern  dramatists — Al- 
bery,  Boucicault,  Byron,  Burnand,  Gil- 
bert, or  Wills — these  they  have.  If  they 
want  Robertson,  Robertson  is  there  for 
them.  If  they  desire  opera-boufife,  de- 
pend upon  it  they  will  have  it,  and 
have  it  they  do.  What  then  do  I  infer  ? 
Simply  this  :  that  those  who  prefer  the 
higher  drama — in  the  representation  of 
which  my  heart's  best  interests  are  cen- 
tred— instead  of  querulously  animadvert- 
ing on  managers  who  give  them  some- 
thing different,  should,  as  Lord  Beacons- 
field  said,  "  make  themselves  into  a  ma- 
jority." If  they  do  so,  the  higher  drama 
will  be  produced.  But  if  we  really  un- 
derstand the  value  of  the  drama,  we  shall 
not  be  too  rigid  in  our  exactions.  The 
drama  is  the  art  of  human  nature  in 
picturesque  or  characteristic  action.  Let 
us  be  liberal  in  our  enjoyment  of  it 
30 


THE     STAGE     AS     IT     IS 

Tragedy,  comedy,  historical-pastoral,  pas- 
toral-comical— remember  the  large-mind- 
ed list  of  the  greatest-minded  poet — all 
are  good,  if  wholesome — and  will  be 
wholesome  if  the  public  continue  to  take 
the  healthy  interest  in  theatres  which 
they  are  now  taking.  The  worst  times 
for  the  stage  have  been  those  when  play- 
going  was  left  pretty  much  to  a  loose 
society,  such  as  is  sketched  in  the  Res- 
toration dramatists.  If  the  good  people 
continue  to  come  to  the  theatre  in  in- 
creasing crowds,  the  stage,  without  losing 
any  of  its  brightness,  will  soon  be  good 
enough,  if  it  is  not  as  yet,  to  satisfy  the 
best  of  them.  This  is  what  I  believe  all 
sensible  people  in  these  times  see.  And 
if,  on  the  one  hand,  you  are  ready  to 
laugh  at  the  old  prejudices  which  have 
been  so  happily  dissipated  ;  on  the  other 
hand,  how  earnestly  must  you  welcome 
the  great  aid  to  taste  and  thought  and 
culture  which  comes  to  you  thus  in  the 

31 


THE      STAGE     AS      IT      IS 

guise  of  amusement.  Let  me  put  this 
to  you  rather  seriously  ;  let  me  insist 
on  the  intellectual  and  moral  use,  alike 
to  the  most  and  least  cultivated  of  us,  of 
this  art  "  most  beautiful,  most  difificult, 
most  rare,"  which  I  stand  here  to-day, 
not  to  apologize  for,  but  to  establish  in 
the  high  place  to  which  it  is  entitled 
among  the  arts  and  among  the  amelio- 
rating influences  of  life.  Grant  that  any 
of  us  understand  a  dramatist  better  for 
seeing  him  acted,  and  it  follows,  first, 
that  all  of  us  will  be  most  indebted  to  the 
stage  at  the  point  where  the  higher  and 
more  ethereal  faculties  are  liable  in  read- 
ing to  failure  and  exhaustion,  that  is,  stage- 
playing  will  be  of  most  use  to  us  where 
the  mind  requires  help  and  inspiration  to 
grasp  and  revel  in  lofty  moral  or  imagi- 
native conceptions,  or  where  it  needs  aid 
and  sharpening  to  appreciate  and  follow 
the  niceties  of  repartee,  or  the  delicacies 
of  comic  fancy.  Secondly,  it  follows 
32 


THE      STAGE     AS      IT      IS 

that  if  this  is  so  with  the  intellectual  few, 
it  must  be  infinitely  more  so  with  the 
unimaginative  many  of  all  ranks.  They 
are  not  inaccessible  to  passion  and  poetry 
and  refinement,  but  their  minds  do  not 
go  forth,  as  it  were,  to  seek  these  joys  ; 
and  even  if  they  read  works  of  poetic 
and  dramatic  fancy,  which  they  rarely 
do,  they  would  miss  them  on  the  printed 
page.  To  them,  therefore,  with  the  ex- 
ception of  a  few  startling  incidents  of 
real  life,  the  theatre  is  the  only  channel 
through  which  are  ever  brought  the  great 
sympathies  of  the  world  of  thought  be- 
yond their  immediate  ken.  And  thirdly, 
it  follows  from  all  this  that  the  stage  is, 
intellectually  and  morally,  to  all  who 
have  recourse  to  it,  the  source  of  some  of 
the  finest  and  best  influences  of  which 
they  are  respectively  susceptible.  To 
the  thoughtful  and  reading  man  it  brings 
the  life,  the  fire,  the  color,  the  vivid  in- 
stinct,  which    are  beyond  the  reach  of 

33 


THE     STAGE     AS      IT      IS 

study.  To  the  common  indifferent  man, 
immersed,  as  a  rule,  in  the  business  and 
socialities  of  daily  life,  it  brings  visions  of 
glory  and  adventure,  of  emotion  and  of 
broad  human  interest.  It  gives  glimpses 
of  the  heights  and  depths  of  character 
and  experience,  setting  him  thinking  and 
wondering  even  in  the  midst  of  amuse- 
ment. To  the  most  torpid  and  unobserv- 
ant it  exhibits  the  humorous  in  life  and 
the  sparkle  and  finesse  of  language,  which 
in  dull  ordinary  existence  is  stupidly  shut 
out  of  knowledge  or  omitted  from  partic- 
ular notice.  To  all  it  uncurtains  a  world, 
not  that  in  which  they  live  and  yet  not 
other  than  it — a  world  in  which  interest 
is  heightened  whilst  the  conditions  of 
truth  are  observed,  in  which  the  capa- 
bilities of  men  and  women  are  seen  devel- 
oped without  losing  their  consistency  to 
nature,  and  developed  with  a  curious  and 
wholesome  fidelity  to  simple  and  uni- 
versal instincts  of  clear  right  and  wrong. 
34 


THE     STAGE     AS     IT     IS 

Be  it  observed — and  I  put  it  most  uncom- 
promisingly— I  am  not  speaking  or  think- 
ing of  any  unrealizable  ideal,  not  of  any 
lofty  imagination  of  what  might  be,  but 
of  what  is,  wherever  there  are  pit  and 
gallery  and  foot-lights.  More  or  less, 
and  taking  one  evening  with  another, 
you  may  find  support  for  an  enthusiastic 
theory  of  stage  morality  and  the  high 
tone  of  audiences  in  most  theatres  in  the 
country  ;  and  if  you  fancy  that  it  is  least 
so  in  the  theatres  frequented  by  the  poor 
you  make  a  great  mistake,  for  in  none  is 
the  appreciation  of  good  moral  fare  more 
marked  than  in  these. 

In  reference  to  the  poorer  classes,  we 
all  lament  the  wide  prevalence  of  intem- 
perate drinking.  Well,  is  it  not  an  obvi- 
ous reflection  that  the  worst  performance 
seen  on  any  of  our  stages  cannot  be  so 
bad  as  drinking  for  a  corresponding  time 
in  a  gin-palace?  I  have  pointed  this 
contrast  before,    and  I  point   it   again. 

35 


THE     STAGE     AS      IT     IS 

The  drinking  we  deplore  takes  place  in 
company — bad  company  ;  it  is  enlivened 
by  talk — bad  talk.  It  is  relished  by  ob- 
scenity. Where  drink  and  low  people 
come  together  these  things  must  be. 
The  worst  that  can  come  of  stage  pander- 
ing to  the  corrupt  tastes  of  its  basest  pa- 
trons cannot  be  anything  like  this,  and,  as 
a  rule,  the  stage  holds  out  long  against 
the  invitation  to  pander ;  and  such  in- 
vitations, from  the  publicity  and  deco- 
rum that  attend  the  whole  matter,  are 
neither  frequent  nor  eager.  A  sort  of 
decency  sets  in  upon  the  coarsest  person 
in  entering  even  the  roughest  theatre.  I 
have  sometimes  thought  that,  consider- 
ing the  liability  to  descend  and  the  fa- 
cility of  descent,  a  special  Providence 
watches  over  the  morals  and  tone  of  our 
English  stage.  I  do  not  desire  to  over- 
charge the  eulogy.  There  never  was  a 
time  when  the  stage  had  not  conspic- 
uous faults.  There  never  was  a  time 
36 


THE      STAGE     AS      IT      IS 

when  these  were  not  freely  admitted 
by  those  most  concerned  for  the  main- 
tenance of  the  stage  at  its  best.  In 
Shakespeare,  whenever  the  subject  of 
the  theatre  is  approached,  we  perceive 
signs  that  that  great  spirit,  though  it  had 
a  practical  and  business-like  vein,  and  es- 
sayed no  impossible  enterprises,  groaned 
under  the  necessities,  or  the  demands 
of  a  public  which  desired  frivolities  and 
deformities  which  jarred  upon  the  poet- 
manager's  feelings.  As  we  descend  the 
course  of  time  we  find  that  each  genera- 
tion looked  back  to  a  supposed  previous 
period  when  taste  ranged  higher,  and 
when  the  inferior  and  offensive  peculiari- 
ties of  the  existing  stage  were  unknown. 
Yet  from  most  of  these  generations  we 
inherit  works  as  well  as  traditions  and 
biographical  recollections  which  the  world 
will  never  let  die.  The  truth  is  that  the 
immortal  part  of  the  stage  is  its  nobler 
part.     Ignoble  accidents   and  interludes 

37 


THE      STAGE     AS      IT      IS 

come  and  go,  but  this  lasts  on  forever. 
It  lives,  like  the  human  soul,  in  the  body 
of  humanity — associated  with  much  that 
is  inferior,  and  hampered  by  many  hin- 
drances— but  it  never  sinks  into  nothing- 
ness, and  never  fails  to  find  new  and 
noble  work  in  creations  of  permanent 
and  memorable  excellence.  Heaven  for- 
bid that  I  should  seem  to  cover,  even 
with  a  counterpane  of  courtesy,  exhibi- 
tions of  deliberate  immorality.  Happily 
this  sort  of  thing  is  not  common,  and 
although  it  has  hardly  been  practised  by 
any  one  who,  without  a  strain  of  mean- 
ing can  be  associated  with  the  profession 
of  acting,  yet  public  censure,  not  active 
enough  to  repress  the  evil,  is  ever  ready 
to  pass  a  sweeping  condemnation  on  the 
stage  which  harbors  it.  Our  cause  is  a 
good  one.  We  go  forth,  armed  with 
the  luminous  panoply  which  genius  has 
forged  for  us,  to  do  battle  with  dulness, 
with  coarseness,  with  apathy,  with  every 
38 


THE      STAGE     AS      IT     IS 

form  of  vice  and  evil.  In  every  human 
heart  there  gleams  a  bright  reflection  of 
this  shining  armor.  The  stage  has  no 
lights  or  shadows  that  are  not  lights  of 
life  and  shadows  of  the  heart.  To  each 
human  consciousness  it  appeals  in  alter- 
nating mirth  and  sadness,  and  will  not 
be  denied.  Err  it  must,  for  it  is  human  ; 
but,  being  human,  it  must  endure.  The 
love  of  acting  is  inherent  in  our  nature. 
Watch  your  children  play,  and  you  will 
see  that  almost  their  first  conscious  effort 
is  to  act  and  to  imitate.  It  is  an  instinct, 
and  you  can  no  more  repress  it  than  you 
can  extinguish  thought.  When  this  in- 
stinct of  all  is  developed  by  cultivation 
in  the  few,  it  becomes  a  wonderful  art, 
priceless  to  civilization  in  the  solace  it 
yields,  the  thought  it  generates,  the  re- 
finement it  inspires.  Some  of  its  latest 
achievements  are  not  unworthy  of  their 
grandest  predecessors.  Some  of  its 
youngest  devotees  are  at  least  as  proud 

39 


THE      STAGE     AS      IT     IS 

of  its  glories  and  as  anxious  to  preserve 
them  as  any  who  have  gone  before. 
Theirs  is  a  glorious  heritage  !  You  honor 
it.  They  have  a  noble  but  a  diflticult, 
and  sometimes  a  disheartening,  task. 
You  encourage  it.  And  no  word  of 
kindly  interest  or  criticism  dropped  in 
the  public  ear  from  friendly  lips  goes  un- 
regarded or  is  unfertile  of  good.  The 
universal  study  of  Shakespeare  in  our 
public  schools  is  a  splendid  sign  of  the 
departure  of  prejudice,  and  all  criticism 
is  welcome ;  but  it  is  acting  chiefly  that 
can  open  to  others,  with  any  spark  of 
Shakespeare's  mind,  the  means  of  illu- 
minating the  world.  Only  the  theatre 
can  realize  to  us  in  a  life-like  way  what 
Shakespeare  was  to  his  own  time.  And 
it  is,  indeed,  a  noble  destiny  for  the 
theatre  to  vindicate  in  these  later  days  the 
greatness  which  sometimes  it  has  seemed 
to  vulgarize.  It  has  been  too  much  the 
custom  to  talk  of  Shakespeare  as  nature's 
40 


THE      STAGE     AS      IT     IS 

child — as  the  lad  who  held  horses  for 
people  who  came  to  the  play — as  a  sort 
of  chance  phenomenon  who  wrote  these 
plays  by  accident  and  unrecognized. 
How  supremely  ridiculous  !  How  utterly 
irreconcilable  with  the  grand  dimensions 
of  the  man  !  How  absurdly  dishonor- 
ing to  the  great  age  of  which  he  was, 
and  was  known  to  be,  the  glory  !  The 
noblest  literary  man  of  all  time — the 
finest  and  yet  most  prolific  writer — the 
greatest  student  of  man,  and  the  greatest 
master  of  man's  highest  gift  of  language 
— surely  it  is  treason  to  humanity  to 
speak  of  such  an  one  as  in  any  sense 
a  commonplace  being  !  Imagine  him 
rather,  as  he  must  have  been,  the  most 
notable  courtier  of  the  Court — the  most 
perfect  gentleman  who  stood  in  the  Eliz- 
abethan throng — the  man  in  whose  pres- 
ence divines  would  falter  and  hesitate 
lest  their  knowledge  of  the  Book  should 
seem   poor  by  the  side   of  his,   and    at 

41 


THE      STAGE     AS      IT     IS 

whom  even  queenly  royalty  would  look 
askance,  with  an  oppressive  sense  that 
here  was  one  to  whose  omnipotent  and 
true  imagination  the  hearts  of  kings  and 
queens  and  peoples  had  always  been 
an  open  page !  The  thought  of  such 
a  man  is  an  incomparable  inheritance 
for  any  nation,  and  such  a  man  was  the 
actor — Shakespeare.  Such  is  our  birth- 
right and  yours.  Such  the  succession  in 
which  it  is  ours  to  labor  and  yours  to 
enjoy.  For  Shakespeare  belongs  to  the 
stage  for  ever,  and  his  glories  must  al- 
ways inalienably  belong  to  it.  If  you 
uphold  the  theatre  honestly,  liberally, 
frankly,  and  with  wise  discrimination, 
the  stage  will  uphold  in  future,  as  it  has 
in  the  past,  the  literature,  the  manners, 
the  morals,  the  fame,  and  the  genius  of 
our  country.  There  must  have  been 
something  wrong,  as  there  was  something 
poignant  and  lacerating,  in  prejudices 
which  so  long  partly  divorced  the  con- 
42 


THE     STAGE     AS      IT     IS 

science  of  Britain  from  its  noblest  pride, 
and  stamped  with  reproach,  or  at  least 
depreciation,  some  of  the  brightest  and 
world-famous  incidents  of  her  history. 
For  myself,  it  kindles  my  heart  with 
proud  delight  to  think  that  I  have  stood 
to-day  before  this  audience — known  for 
its  discrimination  throughout  all  English- 
speaking  lands — a  welcome  and  honored 
guests,  because  I  stand  here  for  justice 
to  the  art  to  which  I  am  devoted — be- 
cause I  stand  here  in  thankfulness  for  the 
justice  which  has  begun  to  be  so  abun- 
dantly rendered  to  it.  If  it  is  metaphor- 
ically the  destiny  of  humanity,  it  is  liter- 
ally the  experience  of  an  actor,  that  one 
man  in  his  time  plays  many  parts.  A 
player  of  any  standing  must  at  various 
times  have  sounded  the  gamut  of  human 
sensibility  from  the  lowest  note  to  the 
top  of  its  compass.  He  must  have  ban- 
queted often  on  curious  food  for  thought 
as  he  meditated  on  the  subtle  relations 

43 


THE     STAGE     AS     IT     IS 

created  between  himself  and  his  audi- 
ences, as  they  have  watched  in  his  im- 
personations the  shifting  tariff — the  ever 
gliding,  delicately  graduated  sliding-scale 
of  dramatic  right  and  wrong.  He  may 
have  gloated,  if  he  be  a  cynic,  over  the 
depths  of  ghastly  horror,  or  the  vagaries 
of  moral  puddle  through  which  it  may 
have  been  his  duty  to  plash.  But  if  he 
be  an  honest  man,  he  will  acknowledge 
that  scarcely  ever  has  either  dramatist  or 
management  wilfully  biassed  the  effect 
of  stage  representation  in  favor  of  evil, 
and  of  his  audiences  he  will  boast  that 
never  has  their  mind  been  doubtful — 
never  has  their  true  perception  of  the 
generous  and  just  been  known  to  fail, 
or  even  to  be  slow.  How  noble  the  priv- 
ilege to  work  upon  these  finer — these 
finest — feelings  of  universal  humanity ! 
How  engrossing  the  fascination  of  those 
thousands  of  steady  eyes,  and  sound 
sympathies,  and  beating  hearts  which  an 
44 


THE      STAGE     AS      IT      IS 

actor  confronts,  with  the  confidence  of 
friendship  and  co-operation,  as  he  steps 
upon  the  stage  to  work  out  in  action 
his  long-pent  comprehension  of  a  noble 
master-piece  !  How  rapturous  the  satis- 
faction of  abandoning  himself,  in  such  a 
presence  and  with  such  sympathizers,  to 
his  author's  grandest  flights  of  thought 
and  noblest  bursts  of  emotional  inspi- 
ration !  And  how  perpetually  sustain- 
ing the  knowledge  that  whatever  may 
be  the  vicissitudes  and  even  the  degra- 
dations of  the  stage,  it  must  and  will  de- 
pend for  its  constant  hold  on  the  affec- 
tion and  attention  of  mankind  upon  its 
loftier  work ;  upon  its  more  penetrating 
passion ;  upon  its  themes  which  most 
deeply  search  out  the  strong  affections 
and  high  hopes  of  men  and  women  ;  upon 
its  fit  and  kindling  illustration  of  great 
and  vivid  lives  which  either  have  been 
lived  in  noble  fact  or  have  deserved 
to    endure    immortally  in    the    popular 

45 


THE      STAGE     AS      IT     IS 

belief  and   admiration  which  they  have 
secured. 

"  For  our  eyes  to  see ! 

Sons  of  wisdom,  song,  and  power, 
Giving  earth  her  richest  dower. 
And  making  nations  free — 
A  glorious  company ! 

"  Call  them  from  the  dead 
For  our  eyes  to  see  ! 
Forms  of  beauty,  love,  and  grace, 
'Sunshine  in  the  shady  place,' 
That  made  it  life  to  be — 
A  blessed  company  1  " 

46 


ADDRESS 

TO  THE  STUDENTS 

OF   THE    UNIVERSITY    OF 

HARVARD 

30TH  MARCH 
1885 


THE    ART    OF    ACTING 


THE   OCCASION. 


AM  deeply  sensible  of  the 
compliment  that  has  been 
paid,  not  so  much  to  me 
personally  as  to  the  calling  I 
represent,  by  the  invitation 
to  deliver  an  address  to  the 
students  of  this  University.  As  an  actor, 
and  especially  as  an  English  actor,  it  is  a 
great  pleasure  to  speak  for  my  art  in  one 
of  the  chief  centres  of  American  culture ; 
for  in  inviting  me  here  to-day  you  in- 
tended, I  believe,  to  recognize  the  drama 
as  an  educational  influence,  to  show  a 

49 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

genuine  interest  in  the  stage  as  a  factor 
in  life  which  must  be  accepted  and  not 
ignored  by  intelligent  people.  I  have 
thought  that  the  best  use  I  can  make  of 
the  privilege  you  have  conferred  upon 
me  is  to  offer  you,  as  well  as  I  am  able, 
something  like  a  practical  exposition  of 
my  art ;  for  it  may  chance — who  knows  ? 
— that  some  of  you  may  at  some  future 
time  be  disposed  to  adopt  it  as  a  voca- 
tion. Not  that  I  wish  to  be  regarded  as 
a  tempter  who  has  come  among  you  to 
seduce  you  from  your  present  studies  by 
artful  pictures  of  the  fascinations  of  the 
footlights.  But  I  naturally  supposed  that 
you  would  like  me  to  choose,  as  the 
theme  of  my  address,  the  subject  in 
which  I  am  most  interested,  and  to  which 
my  life  has  been  devoted;  and  that  if 
any  students  here  should  ever  determine 
to  become  actors,  they  could  not  be  much 
the  worse  for  the  information  and  counsel 
I  could  gather  for  them  from  a  tolerably 
50 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

extensive  experience.  This  subject  will, 
I  trust,  be  welcome  to  all  of  you  who  are 
interested  in  the  stage  as  an  institution 
which  appeals  to  the  sober-minded  and 
intelligent ;  for  I  take  it  that  you  have  no 
lingering  prejudice  against  the  theatre,  or 
else  I  should  not  be  here.  Nor  are  you 
disposed,  like  certain  good  people,  to 
object  to  the  theatre  simply  as  a  name. 
These  sticklers  for  principle  would  never 
enter  a  playhouse  for  worlds ;  and  I  have 
heard  that  in  a  famous  city  of  Massachu- 
setts, not  a  hundred  miles  from  here, 
there  are  persons  to  whom  the  theatre  is 
unknown,  but  who  have  no  objection  to 
see  a  play  in  a  building  which  is  called  a 
museum,  especially  if  the  vestibule  lead- 
ing to  the  theatre  should  be  decorated 
with  sound  moral  principles  in  the  shape 
of  statues,  pictures,  and  stuffed  objects  in 
glass  cases. 

When  I  began  to  think  about  my  sub- 
ject for  the  purpose  of  this  address,  I  was 

SI 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

rather  staggered  by  its  vastness.  It  is 
really  a  matter  for  a  course  of  lectures ; 
but  as  President  Eliot  has  not  proposed 
that  I  should  occupy  a  chair  of  dramatic 
literature  in  this  University,  and  as  time 
and  opportunity  are  limited,  I  can  only 
undertake  to  put  before  you,  in  the  sim- 
plest way,  a  few  leading  ideas  about 
dramatic  art  which  may  be  worthy  of 
reflection.  And  in  doing  this  I  have  the 
great  satisfaction  of  appearing  in  a  model 
theatre,  before  a  model  audience,  and  of 
being  the  only  actor  in  my  own  play. 
Moreover,  I  am  stimulated  by  the  atmos- 
phere of  the  Greek  drama,  for  I  know 
that  on  this  stage  you  have  enacted  a 
Greek  play  with  remarkable  success.  So, 
after  all,  it  is  not  a  body  of  mere  tyros 
that  I  am  addressing,  but  actors  who 
have  worn  the  sock  and  buskin,  and  de- 
claimed the  speeches  which  delighted 
audiences  two  thousand  years  ago. 

Now,  this  address,   like  discourses  in  a 
52 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

more  solemn  place,  falls  naturally  into 
divisions.  I  propose  to  speak  first  of  the 
Art  of  Acting  ;  secondly,  of  its  Require- 
ments and  Practice  ;  and  lastly  of  its 
Rewards.  And,  at  the  outset,  let  me  say 
that  I  want  you  to  judge  the  stage  at  its 
best.  I  do  not  intend  to  suggest  that 
only  the  plays  of  Shakespeare  are  toler- 
able in  the  theatre  to  people  of  taste 
and  intelligence.  The  drama  has  many 
forms — tragedy,  comedy,  historical-pas- 
toral, pastoral-comical — and  all  are  good 
when  their  aim  is  honestly  artistic. 

S3 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 
II 

THE  ART  OF  ACTING, 

Now,  what  is  the  art  of  acting?  I 
speak  of  it  in  its  highest  sense,  as  the  art 
to  which  Roscius,  Betterton,  and  Garrick 
owed  their  fame.  It  is  the  art  of  em- 
bodying the  poet's  creations,  of  giving 
them  flesh  and  blood,  of  making  the 
figures  which  appeal  to  your  mind's  eye 
in  the  printed  drama  live  before  you  on 
the  stage.  ' '  To  fathom  the  depths  of 
character,  to  trace  its  latent  motives,  to 
feel  its  finest  quiverings  of  emotion,  to 
comprehend  the  thoughts  that  are  hidden 
under  words,  and  thus  possess  one's-self 
of  the  actual  mind  of  the  individual  man  " 
— such  was  Macready's  definition  of  the 
player's  art ;  and  to  this  we  may  add 
the  testimony  of  Talma.  He  describes 
tragic  acting  as  "the  union  of  grandeur 
54 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

without  pomp  and  nature  without  trivi- 
ality." It  demands,  he  says,  the  endow- 
ment of  high  sensibility  and  intelligence. 
"  The  actor  who  possesses  this  double 
gift  adopts  a  course  of  study  peculiar  to 
himself  In  the  first  place,  by  repeated 
exercises,  he  enters  deeply  into  the  emo- 
tions, and  his  speech  acquires  the  accent 
proper  to  the  situation  of  the  personage 
he  has  to  represent.  This  done,  he  goes 
to  the  theatre  not  only  to  give  theatrical 
effect  to  his  studies,  but  also  to  yield 
himself  to  the  spontaneous  flashes  of  his 
sensibility  and  all  the  emotions  which  it 
involuntarily  produces  in  him.  What 
does  he  then  do  ?  In  order  that  his  in- 
spirations may  not  be  lost,  his  memory, 
in  the  silence  of  repose,  recalls  the  accent 
of  his  voice,  the  expression  of  his  feat- 
ures, his  action — in  a  word,  the  sponta- 
neous workings  of  his  mind,  which  he 
had  suffered  to  have  free  course,  and,  in 
effect,  everything  which  in  the  moments 

55 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

of  his  exaltation  contributed  to  the  effects 
he  had  produced.  His  intelligence  then 
passes  all  these  means  in  review,  con- 
necting- them  and  fixing  them  in  his 
memory  to  re-employ  them  at  pleasure 
in  succeeding  representations.  These 
impressions  are  often  so  evanescent  that 
on  retiring  behind  the  scenes  he  must 
repeat  to  himself  what  he  had  been  play- 
ing rather  than  what  he  had  to  play. 
By  this  kind  of  labor  the  intelligence 
accumulates  and  preserves  all  the  crea- 
tions of  sensibility.  It  is  by  this  means 
that  at  the  end  of  twenty  years  (it  re- 
quires at  least  this  length  of  time)  a  per- 
son destined  to  display  fine  talent  may 
at  length  present  to  the  public  a  series  of 
characters  acted  almost  to  perfection." 

You  will  readily  understand  from  this 
that  to  the  actor  the  well-worn  maxim 
that  art  is  long  and  life  is  short  has  a 
constant  significance.  The  older  we 
grow  the  more  acutely  alive  we  are  to  the 
56 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

difificulties  of  our  craft.  I  cannot  give 
you  a  better  illustration  of  this  fact  than 
a  story  which  is  told  of  Macready.  A 
friend  of  mine,  once  a  dear  friend  of  his, 
was  with  him  when  he  played  Hamlet 
for  the  last  time.  The  curtain  had  fallen, 
and  the  great  actor  was  sadly  thinking 
that  the  part  he  loved  so  much  would 
never  be  his  again.  And  as  he  took  off 
his  velvet  mantle  and  laid  it  aside,  he 
muttered  almost  unconsciously  the  words 
of  Horatio,  "Good-night,  sweet  Prince  ;  " 
then  turning  to  his  friend,  "Ah,"  said  he, 
"I  am  just  beginning  to  realize  the  sweet- 
ness, the  tenderness,  the  gentleness  of 
this  dear  Hamlet  !  "  Believe  me,  the 
true  artist  never  lingers  fondly  upon 
what  he  has  done.  He  is  ever  thinking 
of  what  remains  undone  :  ever  striving 
toward  an  ideal  it  may  never  be  his 
fortune  to  attain. 

We  are  sometimes  told  that  to  read  the 
best  dramatic  poetry  is  more  educating 

57 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

than  to  see  it  acted.  I  do  not  think  this 
theory  is  very  widely  held,  for  it  is  in 
conflict  with  the  dramatic  instinct,  which 
everybody  possesses  in  a  greater  or  less 
degree.  You  never  met  a  playwright 
who  could  conceive  himself  willing — 
even  if  endowed  with  the  highest  literary 
gifts — to  prefer  a  reading  to  a  playgoing 
public.  He  thinks  his  work  deserving  of 
all  the  rewards  of  print  and  publisher, 
but  he  will  be  much  more  elated  if  it 
should  appeal  to  the  world  in  the  theatre 
as  a  skilful  representation  of  human  pas- 
sions. In  one  of  her  letters  George  Eliot 
says  :  "In  opposition  to  most  people  who 
love  to  read  Shakespeare,  I  like  to  see 
his  plays  acted  better  than  any  others  ; 
his  great  tragedies  thrill  me,  let  them  be 
acted  how  they  may."  All  this  is  so  sim- 
ple and  intelligible,  that  it  seems  scarcely 
worth  while  to  argue  that  in  proportion 
to  the  readiness  with  which  the  reader  of 
Shakespeare  imagines  the  attributes  of 
58 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

the  various  characters,  and  is  interested 
in  their  personality,  he  will,  as  a  rule,  be 
eager  to  see  their  tragedy  or  comedy  in 
action.  He  will  then  find  that  very 
much  which  he  could  not  imagine  with 
any  definiteness  presents  new  images 
every  moment — the  eloquence  of  look 
and  gesture,  the  by-play,  the  inexhaust- 
ible significance  of  the  human  voice. 
There  are  people  who  fancy  they  have 
more  music  in  their  souls  than  was  ever 
translated  into  harmony  by  Beethoven 
or  Mozart.  There  are  others  who 
think  they  could  paint  pictures,  write 
poetry — in  short,  do  anything,  if  they 
only  made  the  effort.  To  them  what 
is  accomplished  by  the  practised  actor 
seems  easy  and  simple.  But  as  it  needs 
the  skill  of  the  musician  to  draw  the  full 
volume  of  eloquence  from  the  written 
score,  so  it  needs  the  skill  of  the  dramat- 
ic artist  to  develop  the  subtle  harmonies 
of  the  poetic  play.    In  fact,  to  do  and  not 

59 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

to  dream,  is  the  mainspring  of  success  in 
life.  The  actor's  art  is  to  act,  and  the 
true  acting  of  any  character  is  one  of  the 
most  difficult  accomplishments.  I  chal- 
lenge the  acute  student  to  ponder  over 
Hamlet's  renunciation  of  Ophelia — one  of 
the  most  complex  scenes  in  all  the  drama 
— and  say  that  he  has  learned  more  from 
his  meditations  than  he  could  be  taught 
by  players  whose  intelligence  is  equal  to 
his  own.  To  present  the  man  thinking 
aloud  is  the  most  difficult  achievement 
of  our  art.  Here  the  actor  who  has  no 
real  grip  of  the  character,  but  simply 
recites  the  speeches  with  a  certain  grace 
and  intelligence,  will  be  untrue.  The 
more  intent  he  is  upon  the  words,  and 
the  less  on  the  ideas  that  dictated  them, 
the  more  likely  he  is  to  lay  himself  open 
to  the  charge  of  mechanical  interpre- 
tation. It  is  perfectly  possible  to  express 
to  an  audience  all  the  involutions  of 
thought,  the  speculation,  doubt,  waver- 
60 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

ing-,  which  reveal  the  meditative  but  ir- 
resokite  mind.  As  the  varying  shades  of 
fancy  pass  and  repass  the  mirror  of  the 
face,  they  may  yield  more  material  to 
the  studious  playgoer  than  he  is  likely 
to  get  by  a  diligent  poring  over  the  text. 
In  short,  as  we  understand  the  people 
around  us  much  better  by  personal 
intercourse  than  by  all  the  revelations 
of  written  words — for  words,  as  Ten- 
nyson says,  "half  reveal  and  half  con- 
ceal the  soul  within, "  so  the  drama  has, 
on  the  whole,  infinitely  more  sugges- 
tions when  it  is  well  acted  than  when 
it  is  interpreted  by  the  unaided  judg- 
ment of  the  student.  It  has  been  said 
that  acting  is  an  unworthy  occupation 
because  it  represents  feigned  emotions, 
but  this  censure  would  apply  with  equal 
force  to  poet  or  novelist.  Do  not  im- 
agine that  I  am  claiming  for  the  actor 
sole  and  undivided  authority.  He 
should  himself  be  a  student,   and  it  is 

6i 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

his  business  to  put  into  practice  the  best 
ideas  he  can  gather  from  the  general 
current  of  thought  with  regard  to  the 
highest  dramatic  literature.  But  it  is 
he  who  gives  body  to  those  ideas — fire, 
force,  and  sensibility,  without  which  they 
would  remain  for  most  people  mere  airy 
abstractions. 

It  is  often  supposed  that  great  actors 
trust  to  the  inspiration  of  the  moment. 
Nothing  can  be  more  erroneous.  There 
will,  of  course,  be  such  moments,  when 
an  actor  at  a  white  heat  illumines  some 
passage  with  a  flash  of  imagination  (and 
this  mental  condition,  by  the  way,  is 
impossible  to  the  student  sitting  in  his 
arm-chair)  ;  but  the  great  actor's  surprises 
are  generally  well  weighed,  studied,  and 
balanced.  We  know  that  Edmund  Kean 
constantly  practised  before  a  mirror  ef- 
fects which  startled  his  audience  by  their 
apparent  spontaneity.  It  is  the  accu- 
mulation of  such  effects  which  enables 
62 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

an  actor,  after  many  years,  to  present 
many  great  characters  with  remarkable 
completeness. 

I  do  not  want  to  overstate  the  case,  or 
to  appeal  to  anything  that  is  not  within 
common  experience,  so  I  can  confidently 
ask  you  whether  a  scene  in  a  great  play 
has  not  been  at  some  time  vividly  im- 
pressed on  your  minds  by  the  delivery 
of  a  single  line,  or  even  of  one  forcible 
word.  Has  not  this  made  the  passage 
far  more  real  and  human  to  you  than 
all  the  thought  you  have  devoted  to  it  ? 
An  accomplished  critic  has  said  that 
Shakespeare  himself  might  have  been 
surprised  had  he  heard  the  "Fool,  fool, 
fool  !  "  of  Edmund  Kean.  And  though 
all  actors  are  not  Keans,  they  have  in 
varying  degree  this  power  of  making  a 
dramatic  character  step  out  of  the  page, 
and  come  nearer  to  our  hearts  and  our 
understandings. 

After  all,  the  best  and  most  convincing 

63 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

exposition  of  the  whole  art  of  acting  is 
given  by  Shakespeare  himself :  ' '  To  hold, 
as  'twere,  the  mirror  up  to  nature,  to 
show  virtue  her  own  feature,  scorn  her 
own  image,  and  the  very  age  and  body 
of  the  time  his  form  and  pressure."  Thus 
the  poet  recognized  the  actor's  art  as  a 
most  potent  ally  in  the  representation  of 
human  life.  He  believed  that  to  hold 
the  mirror  up  to  nature  was  one  of  the 
worthiest  functions  in  the  sphere  of 
labor,  and  actors  are  content  to  point 
to  his  definition  of  their  work  as  the 
charter  of  their  privileges. 
64 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 
III. 

PRACTICE  OF  THE  ART. 

The  practice  of  the  art  of  acting  is  a 
subject  difficult  to  treat  with  the  neces- 
sary brevity.  Beginners  are  naturally 
anxious  to  know  what  course  they  should 
pursue.  In  common  with  other  actors, 
I  receive  letters  from  young  people  many 
of  whom  are  very  earnest  in  their  am- 
bition to  adopt  the  dramatic  calling,  but 
not  sufficiently  alive  to  the  fact  that 
success  does  not  depend  on  a  few  les- 
sons in  declamation.  When  I  was  a  boy 
I  had  a  habit  which  I  think  would  be 
useful  to  all  young  students.  Before 
going  to  see  a  play  of  Shakespeare's  I 
used  to  form — in  a  very  juvenile  way — 
a  theory  as  to  the  working  out  of  the 
whole  drama,  so  as  to  correct  my  con- 
ceptions   by    those   of  the    actors ;    and 

65 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

though  I  was,  as  a  rule,  absurdly  wrong, 
there  can  be  no  doubt  that  any  method 
of  independent  study  is  of  enormous 
importance,  not  only  to  youngsters,  but 
also  to  students  of  a  larger  growth. 
Without  it  the  mind  is  apt  to  take  its 
stamp  from  the  first  forcible  impression 
it  receives,  and  to  fall  into  a  servile  de- 
pendence upon  traditions,  which,  robbed 
of  the  spirit  that  created  them,  are  apt 
to  be  purely  mischievous.  What  was 
natural  to  the  creator  is  often  unnatural 
and  lifeless  in  the  imitator.  No  two 
people  form  the  same  conceptions  of 
character,  and  therefore  it  is  always 
advantageous  to  see  an  independent 
and  courageous  exposition  of  an  original 
ideal.  There  can  be  no  objection  to  the 
kind  of  training  that  imparts  a  knowledge 
of  manners  and  customs,  and  the  teach- 
ing which  pertains  to  simple  deportment 
on  the  stage  is  necessary  and  most 
useful  ;  but  you  cannot  possibly  be 
66 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

taught  any  tradition  of  character,  for  that 
has  no  permanence.  Nothing  is  more 
fleeting  than  any  traditional  method  ot 
impersonation.  You  may  learn  where  a 
particular  personage  used  to  stand  on  the 
stage,  or  down  which  trap  the  ghost  of 
Hamlet's  father  vanished ;  but  the  soul 
of  interpretation  is  lost,  and  it  is  this 
soul  which  the  actor  has  to  re-create  for 
himself.  It  is  not  mere  attitude  or  tone 
that  has  to  be  studied ;  you  must  be 
moved  by  the  impulse  of  being;  you 
must  impersonate  and  not  recite. 

There  has  always  been  a  controversy 
as  to  the  province  of  naturalism  in  dra- 
matic art.  In  England  it  has  been  too 
much  the  custom,  I  believe,  while  de- 
manding naturalism  in  comedy,  to  ex- 
pect a  false  inflation  in  tragedy.  But 
there  is  no  reason  why  an  actor  should 
be  less  natural  in  tragic  than  in  lighter 
moods.  Passions  vary  in  expression 
according  to   moulds   of  character  and 

67 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

manners,  but  their  reality  should  not  be 
lost  even  when  they  are  expressed  in  the 
heroic  forms  of  the  drama.  A  very  sim- 
ple test  is  a  reference  to  the  records  of 
old  actors.  What  was  it  in  their  per- 
formances that  chiefly  impressed  their 
contemporaries  ?  Very  rarely  the  meas- 
ured recitation  of  this  or  that  speech,  but 
very  often  a  simple  exclamation  that 
deeply  moved  their  auditors,  because  it 
was  a  gleam  of  nature  in  the  midst  of 
declamation.  The  "Prithee,  undo  this 
button  ! "  of  Garrick,  was  remembered 
when  many  stately  utterances  were 
forgotten.  In  our  day  the  contrast 
between  artificial  declamation  and  the 
accents  of  nature  is  less  marked,  because 
its  delivery  is  more  uniformly  simple, 
and  an  actor  who  lapses  from  a  natural 
into  a  false  tone  is  sure  to  find  that  his 
hold  upon  his  audience  is  proportion- 
ately weakened.  But  the  revolution 
which  Garrick  accomplished  may  be  im- 
68 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

agined  from  the  story  told  by  Boswell. 
Dr.  Johnson  was  discussing  plays  and 
players  with  Mrs.  Siddons,  and  he  said  : 
"Garrick,  madam,  was  no  declaimer  ; 
there  was  not  one  of  his  own  scene- 
shifters  who  could  not  have  spoken  '  To 
be  or  not  to  be '  better  than  he  did  ;  yet 
he  was  the  only  actor  I  ever  saw  whom 
I  could  call  a  master,  both  in  tragedy 
and  comedy,  though  I  liked  him  best  in 
comedy.  A  true  conception  of  charac- 
ter and  natural  expression  of  it  were  his 
distinguished  excellences." 

To  be  natural  on  the  stage  is  most  dif- 
ficult, and  yet  a  grain  of  nature  is  worth 
a  bushel  of  artifice.  But  you  may  say — 
what  is  nature?  I  quoted  just  now 
Shakespeare's  definition  of  the  actor's  art. 
After  the  exhortation  to  hold  the  mirror 
up  to  nature,  he  adds  the  pregnant  warn- 
ing :  "This  overdone  or  come  tardy  off, 
though  it  make  the  unskilful  laugh,  can- 
not but  make  the  judicious  grieve,   the 

69 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

censure  of  which  one  must  in  your  al- 
lowance o'erweigh  a  whole  theatre  of 
others."  Nature  may  be  overdone  by 
triviality  in  conditions  that  demand  ex- 
altation ;  for  instance,  Hamlet's  first 
address  to  the  Ghost  lifts  his  disposition 
to  an  altitude  far  beyond  the  ordinary 
reaches  of  our  souls,  and  his  manner  of 
speech  should  be  adapted  to  this  senti- 
ment. But  such  exaltation  of  utterance 
is  wholly  out  of  place  in  the  purely 
colloquial  scene  with  the  Gravedigger. 
When  Macbeth  says,  "Go,  bid  thy  mis- 
tress, when  my  drink  is  ready,  she  strike 
upon  the  bell,"  he  would  not  use  the 
tone  of 

"  Pity,  like  a  naked  new-born  babe, 

Striding  the  blast,  or  Heaven's  cherubim,  horsed 
Upon  the  sightless  couriers  of  the  air. 
Shall  blow  the  horrid  deed  in  every  eye, 
That  tears  shall  drown  the  wind." 

Like   the   practised    orator,    the   actor 
rises  and  descends  with  his  sentiment, 
70 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

and  cannot  always  be  in  a  fine  phrenzy. 
This  variety  is  especially  necessary  in 
Shakespeare,  whose  work  is  essentially 
different  from  the  classic  drama,  because 
it  presents  every  mood  of  mind  and 
form  of  speech,  commonplace  or  ex- 
alted, as  character  and  situation  dictate  : 
whereas  in  such  a  play  as  Addison's  Cato, 
everybody  is  consistently  eloquent  about 
everything. 

There  are  many  causes  for  the  growth 
of  naturalism  in  dramatic  art,  and 
amongst  them  we  should  remember  the 
improvement  in  the  mechanism  of  the 
stage.  For  instance,  there  has  been  a 
remarkable  development  in  stage-light- 
ing. In  old  pictures  you  will  observe 
the  actors  constantly  standing  in  a  line, 
because  the  oil-lamps  of  those  days  gave 
such  an  indifferent  illumination  that 
everybody  tried  to  get  into  what  was 
called  the  focus — the  "blaze  of  publi- 
city"  furnished  by  the  "float"  or  foot- 

71 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

lights.  The  importance  of  this  is  ilhis- 
trated  by  an  amusing  story  of  Edmund 
Kean,  who  one  night  played  Othello  with 
more  than  his  usual  intensity.  An  ad- 
mirer who  met  him  in  the  street  next 
day  was  loud  in  his  congratulations  :  "I 
really  thought  you  would  have  choked 
lago,  Mr.  Kean — you  seemed  so  tremen- 
dously in  earnest."  "  In  earnest !  "  said 
the  tragedian,  "I  should  think  so! 
Hang  the  fellow,  he  was  trying  to  keep 
me  out  of  the  focus." 

I  do  not  recommend  actors  to  allow 
their  feelings  to  carry  them  away  like 
this  ;  but  it  is  necessary  to  warn  you 
against  the  theory  expounded  with  bril- 
liant ingenuity  by  Diderot,  that  the  actor 
never  feels.  When  Macready  played 
Virginius,  after  burying  his  beloved 
daughter,  he  confessed  that  his  real  ex- 
perience gave  a  new  force  to  his  acting 
in  the  most  pathetic  situations  of  the 
play.  Are  we  to  suppose  that  this  was 
72 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

a  delusion,  or  that  the  sensibility  of  the 
man  was  a  genuine  aid  to  the  actor? 
Bannister  said  of  John  Kemble  that  he 
was  never  pathetic  because  he  had  no 
children.  Talma  says  that  when  deeply 
moved  he  found  himself  making-  a  rapid 
and  fugitive  observation  on  the  alterna- 
tion of  his  voice,  and  on  a  certain  spas- 
modic vibration  which  it  contracted  in 
tears.  Has  not  the  actor  who  can  thus 
make  his  feelings  a  part  of  his  art  an  ad- 
vantage over  the  actor  who  never  feels, 
but  who  makes  his  observations  solely 
from  the  feelings  of  others  ?  It  is  neces- 
sary to  this  art  that  the  mind  should 
have,  as  it  were,  a  double  consciousness, 
in  which  all  the  emotions  proper  to  the 
occasion  may  have  full  swing,  while  the 
actor  is  all  the  time  on  the  alert  for  every 
detail  of  his  method.  It  may  be  that 
his  playing  will  be  more  spirited  one 
night  than  another.  But  the  actor  who 
combines  the   electric  force  of  a  strong 

73 


THE     ART      OF     ACTING 

personality  with  a  mastery  of  the  re- 
sources of  his  art  must  have  a  greater 
power  over  his  audiences  than  the  pas- 
sionless actor  who  gives  a  most  artistic 
simulation  of  the  emotions  he  never 
experiences. 

Now,  in  the  practice  of  acting,  a  most 
important  point  is  the  study  of  elocu- 
tion ;  and  in  elocution  one  great  diffi- 
culty is  the  use  of  sufficient  force  to  be 
generally  heard  without  being  unnaturally 
loud,  and  without  acquiring  a  stilted  de- 
livery. The  advice  of  the  old  actors  was 
that  you  should  always  pitch  your  voice 
so  as  to  be  heard  by  the  back  row  of 
the  gallery — no  easy  task  to  accomplish 
without  offending  the  ears  of  the  front  of 
the  orchestra.  And  I  should  tell  you  that 
this  exaggeration  applies  to  everything 
on  the  stage.  To  appear  to  be  natural, 
you  must  in  reality  be  much  broader 
than  nature.  To  act  on  the  stage  as  one 
really  would  in  a  room,  would  be  ineffec- 
74 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

live  and  colorless.  I  never  knew  an 
actor  who  brought  the  art  of  elocution  to 
greater  perfection  than  the  late  Charles 
Mathews,  whose  utterance  on  the  stage 
appeared  so  natural  that  one  was  sur- 
prised to  find  when  near  him  that  he 
was  really  speaking  in  a  very  loud  key. 
There  is  a  great  actor  in  your  own  coun- 
try to  whose  elocution  one  always  listens 
with  the  utmost  enjoyment — I  mean 
Edwin  Booth.  He  has  inherited  this 
gift,  I  believe,  from  his  famous  father, 
of  whom  I  have  heard  it  said,  that  he 
always  insisted  on  a  thorough  use  of  the 
"instruments" — by  which  he  meant  the 
teeth — in  the  formation  of  words. 

An  imperfect  elocution  is  apt  to  degen- 
erate into  a  monotonous  uniformity  of 
tone.  Some  wholesome  advice  on  this 
point  we  find  in  the  Life  of  Betterton. 

"This  stiff  uniformity  of  voice  is  not 
only  displeasing  to  the  ear,  but  dis- 
appoints the  effect  of  the  discourse  on 

75 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

the  hearers ;  first,  by  an  equal  way  of 
speaking,  when  the  pronunciation  has 
everywhere,  in  every  word  and  every  syl- 
lable, the  same  sound,  it  must  inevitably 
render  all  parts  of  speech  equal,  and  so 
put  them  on  a  very  unjust  level.  So  that 
the  power  of  the  reasoning  part,  the  lustre 
and  ornament  of  the  figures,  the  heart, 
warmth,  and  vigor  of  the  passionate  part 
being  expressed  all  in  the  same  tone,  is 
fiat  and  insipid,  and  lost  in  a  supine,  or 
at  least  unmusical  pronunciation.  So 
that,  in  short,  that  which  ought  to  strike 
and  stir  up  the  affections,  because  it  is 
spoken  all  alike,  without  any  distinction 
or  variety,  moves  them  not  at  all. " 

Now,  on  the  question  of  pronunciation 
there  is  something  to  be  said,  which,  I 
think,  in  ordinary  teaching  is  not  suffi- 
ciently considered.  Pronunciation  on 
the  stage  should  be  simple  and  un- 
affected, but  not  always  fashioned  rigidly 
according  to  a  dictionary  standard.  No 
76 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

less  an  authority  than  Cicero  points  out 
that  pronunciation  must  vary  widely  ac- 
cording to  the  emotions  to  be  expressed  ; 
that  it  may  be  broken  or  cut,  with  a  vary- 
ing or  direct  sound,  and  that  it  serves  for 
the  actor  the  purpose  of  color  to  the 
painter,  from  which  to  draw  his  varia- 
tions. Take  the  simplest  illustration,  the 
formal  pronunciation  of  "A-h"  is  "Ah," 
of  "0-h"  "Oh  ; "  but  you  cannot  stereo- 
type the  expression  of  emotion  like  this. 
These  exclamations  are  words  of  one 
syllable,  but  the  speaker  who  is  sounding 
the  gamut  of  human  feeling  will  not  be 
restricted  in  his  pronunciation  by  the 
dictionary  rule.  It  is  said  of  Edmund 
Kean  that  he  never  spoke  such  ejacula- 
tions, but  always  sighed  or  groaned 
them.  Fancy  an  actor  saying  thus,  "My 
Desdemona  !  Oh,  oh,  oh  ! "  Words  are 
intended  to  express  feelings  and  ideas, 
not  to  bind  them  in  rigid  fetters.  The 
accents  of  pleasure  are  different  from  the 

77 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

accents  of  pain,  and  if  a  feeling  is  more 
accurately  expressed,  as  in  nature,  by  a 
variation  of  sound  not  provided  for  by 
the  laws  of  pronunciation,  then  such  im- 
perfect laws  must  be  disregarded  and 
nature  vindicated.  The  word  should  be 
the  echo  of  the  sense. 

The  force  of  an  actor  depends,  of 
course,  upon  his  physique  ;  and  it  is  nec- 
essary, therefore,  that  a  good  deal  of 
attention  should  be  given  to  bodily  train- 
ing. Everything  that  develops  supple- 
ness, elasticity,  and  grace — that  most 
subtle  charm — should  be  carefully  culti- 
vated, and  in  this  regard  your  admirable 
gymnasium  is  worth  volumes  of  advice. 
Sometimes  there  is  a  tendency  to  train 
the  body  at  the  expense  of  the  mind,  and 
the  young  actor  with  striking  physical 
advantages  must  beware  of  regarding 
this  fortunate  endowment  as  his  entire 
stock-in-trade.  That  way  folly  lies,  and 
the  result  may  be  too  dearly  purchased 
78 


THE     ART      OF     ACTING 

by  the  fame  of  a  photographer's  window. 
Jt  is  clear  that  the  physique  of  actors 
must  vary  ;  there  can  be  no  mihtary 
standard  of  proportions  on  the  stage. 
Some  great  actors  have  had  to  struggle 
against  physical  disabilities  of  a  serious 
nature.  Betterton  had  an  unprepossess- 
ing face  ;  so  had  Le  Kain.  John  Kemble 
was  troubled  with  a  weak,  asthmatic 
voice,  and  yet  by  his  dignity,  and  the 
force  of  his  personality,  he  was  able  to 
achieve  the  greatest  effects.  In  some 
cases  a  super-abundant  physique  has  in- 
capacitated actors  from  playing  many 
parts.  The  combination  in  one  frame  of 
all  the  gifts  of  mind  and  all  the  advan- 
tages in  person  is  very  rare  on  the  stage  ; 
but  talent  will  conquer  many  natural  de- 
fects when  it  is  sustained  by  energy  and 
perseverance. 

With  regard  to  gesture,  Shakespeare's 
advice  is  all-embracing.  ' '  Suit  the  action 
to  the  word,  the  word  to  the  action,  with 

79 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

this  special  observance  that  you  over-step 
not  the  modesty  of  nature."  And  here 
comes  the  consideration  of  a  very  mate- 
rial part  of  the  actor's  business — by-play. 
This  is  of  the  very  essence  of  true  art. 
It  is  more  than  anything  else  significant 
of  the  extent  to  w^hich  the  actor  has  iden- 
tified himself  w^ith  the  character  he  repre- 
sents. Recall  the  scenes  between  lago 
and  Othello,  and  consider  how  the  whole 
interest  of  the  situation  depends  on  the 
skill  with  which  the  gradual  effect  of  the 
poisonous  suspicion  instilled  into  the 
Moor's  mind  is  depicted  in  look  and  tone, 
slight  of  themselves,  but  all  contributing 
to  the  intensity  of  the  situation.  One  of 
the  greatest  tests  of  an  actor  is  his  capa- 
city for  listening.  By-play  must  be  un- 
obtrusive ;  the  student  should  remember 
that  the  most  minute  expression  attracts 
attention  :  that  nothing  is  lost,  that  by- 
play is  as  mischievous  when  it  is  injudi- 
cious as  it  is  effective  when  rightly  con- 
80 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

ceived,  and  that  while  trifles  make  per- 
fection, perfection  is  no  trifle.  This 
lesson  was  enjoined  on  me  when  I  was 
a  very  young  man  by  that  remarkable 
actress,  Charlotte  Cushman.  I  remember 
that  when  she  played  Meg  Merrilies  I  was 
cast  for  Henry  Bertram,  on  the  principle, 
seemingly,  that  an  actor  with  no  singing 
voice  is  admirably  fitted  for  a  singing 
part.  It  was  my  duty  to  give  Meg  Mer- 
rilies a  piece  of  money,  and  I  did  it  after 
the  traditional  fashion  by  handing  her  a 
large  purse  full  of  coin  of  the  realm,  in 
the  shape  of  broken  crockery,  which  was 
generally  used  in  financial  transactions 
on  the  stage,  because  when  the  virtuous 
maiden  rejected  with  scorn  the  advances 
of  the  lordly  libertine,  and  threw  his  per- 
nicious bribe  upon  the  ground,  the  clatter 
of  the  broken  crockery  suggested  fabu- 
lous wealth.  But  after  the  play  Miss 
Cushman,  in  the  course  of  some  kindly 
advice,  said  to  me  :   "Instead  of  giving 

8i 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

me  that  purse  don't  you  think  it  would 
have  been  much  more  natural  if  you  had 
taken  a  number  of  coins  from  your  pock- 
et, and  given  me  the  smallest  ?  That  is 
the  way  one  gives  alms  to  a  beggar,  and 
it  would  have  added  to  the  realism  of  the 
scene."  I  have  never  forgotten  that  les- 
son, for  simple  as  it  was,  it  contained 
many  elements  of  dramatic  truth.  It  is 
most  important  that  an  actor  should  learn 
that  he  is  a  figure  in  a  picture,  and  that 
the  least  exaggeration  destroys  the  har- 
mony of  the  composition.  All  the  mem- 
bers of  the  company  should  work 
towards  a  common  end,  with  the  nicest 
subordination  of  their  individuality  to  the 
general  purpose.  Without  this  method  a 
play  when  acted  is  at  best  a  disjointed 
and  incoherent  piece  of  work,  instead  of 
being  a  harmonious  whole  like  the  fine 
performance  of  an  orchestral  symphony. 
The  root  of  the  matter  is  that  the  actor 
must  before  all  things  form  a  definite  con- 
82 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

ception  of  what  he  wishes  to  convey.  It 
is  better  to  be  wrong  and  be  consistent, 
than  to  be  right,  yet  hesitating  and  un- 
certain. This  is  why  great  actors  are 
sometimes  very  bad  or  very  good.  They 
will  do  the  wrong  thing  with  a  courage 
and  thoroughness  which  makes  the  error 
all  the  more  striking;  although  when 
they  are  right  they  may  often  be  superb. 
It  is  necessary  that  the  actor  should  learn 
to  think  before  he  speaks ;  a  practice 
which,  I  believe,  is  very  useful  off  the 
stage.  Let  him  remember,  first,  that 
every  sentence  expresses  a  new  thought 
and,  therefore,  frequently  demands  a 
change  of  intonation  ;  secondly,  that  the 
thought  precedes  the  word.  Of  course 
there  are  passages  in  which  thought  and 
language  are  borne  along  by  the  streams 
of  emotion  and  completely  intermingled. 
But  more  often  it  will  be  found  that  the 
most  natural,  the  most  seemingly  acciden- 
tal effects  are  obtained  when  the  working 

83 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

of  the  mind  is  seen  before  the  tongue 
gives  it  words. 

You  will  see  that  the  limits  of  an  ac- 
tor's studies  are  very  wide.  To  master 
the  technicalities  of  his  craft,  to  famil- 
iarize his  mind  with  the  structure,  rhythm, 
and  the  soul  of  poetry,  to  be  constantly 
cultivating  his  perceptions  of  life  around 
him  and  of  all  the  arts — painting,  music, 
sculpture — for  the  actor  who  is  devoted 
to  his  profession  is  susceptible  to  every 
harmony  of  color,  sound,  and  form — to 
do  this  is  to  labor  in  a  large  field  of  in- 
dustry. But  all  your  training,  bodily  and 
mental,  is  subservient  to  the  two  great 
principles  in  tragedy  and  comedy — pas- 
sion and  geniality.  Geniality  in  comedy 
is  one  of  the  rarest  gifts.  Think  of  the 
rich  unction  of  Falstaff,  the  mercurial 
fancy  of  Mercutio,  the  witty  vivacity  and 
manly  humor  of  Benedick — think  of  the 
qualities,  natural  and  acquired,  that  are 
needed  for  the  complete  portrayal  of  such 
84 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

characters,  and  you  will  understand  how 
difficult  it  is  for  a  comedian  to  rise  to 
such  a  sphere.  In  tragedy,  passion  or 
intensity  sweeps  all  before  it,  and  when 
I  say  passion,  I  mean  the  passion  of 
pathos  as  well  as  wrath  or  revenge. 
These  are  the  supreme  elements  of  the 
actor's  art,  which  cannot  be  taught  by 
any  system,  however  just,  and  to  which 
all  education  is  but  tributary. 

Now  all  that  can  be  said  of  the  neces- 
sity of  a  close  regard  for  nature  in  acting 
applies  with  equal  or  greater  force  to  the 
presentation  of  plays.  You  want,  above 
all  things,  to  have  a  truthful  picture  which 
shall  appeal  to  the  eye  without  distracting 
the  imagination  from  the  purpose  of  the 
drama.  It  is  a  mistake  to  suppose  that 
this  enterprise  is  comparatively  new  to 
the  stage.  Since  Shakespeare's  time 
there  has  been  a  steady  progress  in  this 
direction.  Even  in  the  poet's  day  every 
conceivable    property  was    forced    into 

85 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

requisition,  and  his  own  sense  of  short- 
comings in  this  respect  is  shown  in 
Henry  V.  when  he  exclaims  : — 

"  Where — O  for  pity ! — we  shall  much  disgrace 
With  four  or  five  most  vile  and  ragged  foils 
The  name  of  Agincourt." 

There  have  always  been  critics  who 
regarded  care  and  elaboration  in  the 
mounting  of  plays  as  destructive  of  the 
real  spirit  of  the  actor's  art.  Betterton 
had  to  meet  this  reproach  when  he  intro- 
duced scenery  in  lieu  of  linsey-woolsey 
curtains  ;  but  he  replied,  sensibly  enough, 
that  his  scenery  was  better  than  the  tap- 
estry with  hideous  figures  worked  upon  it 
which  had  so  long  distracted  the  senses 
of  play-goers.  He  might  have  asked  his 
critics  whether  they  wished  to  see  Ophelia 
played  by  a  boy  of  sixteen,  as  in  the  time 
of  Shakespeare,  instead  of  a  beautiful  and 
gifted  woman.  Garrick  did  his  utmost  to 
improve  the  mechanical  arts  of  the  stage 
86 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

— so  much  so,  indeed,  that  he  paid  his 
scene-painter,  Loutherbourg,  ^^500  a  year, 
a  pretty  considerable  sum  in  those  days 
— though  in  Garrick's  time  the  importance 
of  reaHsm  in  costume  was  not  sufficiently 
appreciated  to  prevent  him  from  playing 
Macbeth  in  a  bagwig.  To-day  we  are 
employing  all  our  resources  to  heighten 
the  picturesque  effects  of  the  drama,  and 
we  are  still  told  that  this  is  a  gross  error. 
It  may  be  admitted  that  nothing  is 
more  objectionable  than  certain  kinds  of 
realism,  which  are  simply  vulgar ;  but 
harmony  of  color  and  grace  of  outline 
have  a  legitimate  sphere  in  the  theatre, 
and  the  method  which  uses  them  as  ad- 
juncts may  claim  to  be  "as  wholesome 
as  sweet,  and  by  very  much  more  hand- 
some than  fine."  For  the  abuse  of  scenic 
decoration,  the  overloading  of  the  stage 
with  ornament,  the  subordination  of  the 
play  to  a  pageant,  I  have  nothing  to  say. 
That  is  all  foreign  to  the  artistic  purpose 

87 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

which  should  dominate  dramatic  work. 
Nor  do  I  think  that  servility  to  archaeo- 
logy on  the  stage  is  an  unmixed  good. 
Correctness  of  costume  is  admirable  and 
necessary  up  to  a  certain  point,  but  when 
it  ceases  to  be  "  as  wholesome  as  sweet, "  it 
should,  I  think,  be  sacrificed.  You  per- 
ceive that  the  nicest  discretion  is  needed 
in  the  use  of  the  materials  which  are  now- 
adays at  the  disposal  of  the  manager. 
Music,  painting,  architecture,  the  end- 
less variations  of  costume,  have  all  to  be 
employed  with  a  strict  regard  to  the  pro- 
duction of  an  artistic  whole,  in  which  no 
element  shall  be  unduly  obtrusive.  We 
are  open  to  microscopic  criticism  at 
every  point.  When  Much  Ado  about 
Nothing  was  produced  at  the  Lyceum, 
I  received  a  letter  complaining  of  the 
gross  violation  of  accuracy  in  a  scene 
which  was  called  a  cedar-walk.  ' '  Ce- 
dars !  "  said  my  correspondent,  —  "why, 
cedars  were  not  introduced  into  Messina 
88 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

for  fifty  years  after  the  date  of  Shake- 
speare's story  ! "  Well,  this  was  a  tre- 
mendous indictment,  but  unfortunately 
the  cedar-walk  had  been  painted.  Ab- 
solute realism  on  the  stage  is  not  al- 
ways desirable,  any  more  than  the  photo- 
graphic reproduction  of  Nature  can  claim 
to  rank  with  the  highest  art. 

89 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 
IV. 

THE  REWARDS  OF  THE  ART. 

To  what  position  in  the  world  of  in- 
telligence does  the  actor's  art  entitle  him, 
and  what  is  his  contribution  to  the  gen- 
eral sum  of  instruction  ?  We  are  often 
told  that  the  art  is  ephemeral ;  that  it 
creates  nothing ;  that  when  the  actor's 
personality  is  withdrawn  from  the  public 
eye  he  leaves  no  trace  behind.  Granted 
that  his  art  creates  nothing  ;  but  does  it 
not  often  restore  .-*  It  is  true  that  he 
leaves  nothing  like  the  canvas  of  the 
painter  and  the  marble  of  the  sculptor, 
but  has  he  done  nought  to  increase  the 
general  stock  of  ideas  ?  The  astrono- 
mer and  naturalist  create  nothing,  but 
they  contribute  much  to  the  enlighten- 
ment of  the  world.  I  am  taking  the 
highest  standard  of  my  art,  for  I  main- 
90 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

tain  that  in  judging  any  calling  you 
should  consider  its  noblest  and  not  its 
most  ignoble  products.  All  the  work 
that  is  done  on  the  stage  cannot  stand 
upon  the  same  level,  any  more  than  all 
the  work  that  is  done  in  literature.  You 
do  not  demand  that  your  poets  and 
novelists  shall  all  be  of  the  same  calibre. 
An  immense  amount  of  good  wanting 
does  no  more  than  increase  the  gayety 
of  mankind  ;  but  when  Johnson  said  that 
the  gayety  of  nations  was  eclipsed  by 
the  death  of  Garrick,  he  did  not  mean 
that  a  mere  barren  amusement  had  lost 
one  of  its  professors.  When  Sir  Joshua 
Reynolds  painted  Mrs.  Siddons  as  the 
Tragic  Muse,  and  said  he  had  achieved 
immortality  by  putting  his  name  on  the 
hem  of  her  garment,  he  meant  some- 
thing more  than  a  pretty  compliment, 
for  her  name  can  never  die.  To  give 
genuine  and  wholesome  entertainment 
is  a  very  large  function  of  the  stage,  and 

91 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

without  that  entertainment  very  many 
lives  would  lose  a  stimulus  of  the  high- 
est value.  If  recreation  of  every  legiti- 
mate kind  is  invaluable  to  the  worker, 
especially  so  is  the  recreation  of  the 
drama,  which  brightens  his  faculties,  en- 
larges his  vision  of  the  picturesque,  and 
by  taking  him  for  a  time  out  of  this 
work-a-day  world,  braces  his  sensibili- 
ties for  the  labors  of  life.  The  art  which 
does  this  may  surely  claim  to  exercise 
more  than  a  fleeting  influence  upon  the 
world's  intelligence.  But  in  its  highest 
developments  it  does  more  ;  it  acts  as 
a  constant  medium  for  the  diffusion  of 
great  ideas,  and  by  throwing  new  lights 
upon  the  best  dramatic  literature,  it  large- 
ly helps  the  growth  of  education.  It  is 
not  too  much  to  say  that  the  interpret- 
ers of  Shakespeare  on  the  stage  have 
had  much  to  do  with  the  widespread 
appreciation  of  his  works.  Some  of  the 
most  thoughtful  students  of  the  poet 
92 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

have  recognized  their  indebtedness  to 
actors,  while  for  multitudes  the  stage  has 
performed  the  office  of  discovery.  Thou- 
sands who  flock  to-day  to  see  a  represen- 
tation of  Shakespeare,  which  is  the  pro- 
duct of  much  reverent  study  of  the  poet, 
are  not  content  to  regard  it  as  a  mere 
scenic  exhibition.  Without  it  Shake- 
speare might  have  been  for  many  of 
them  a  sealed  book ;  but  many  more 
have  been  impelled  by  the  vivid  realism 
of  the  stage  to  renew  studies  which 
other  occupations  or  lack  of  leisure  have 
arrested.  Am  I  presumptuous,  then,  in 
asserting  that  the  stage  is  not  only  an 
instrument  of  amusement,  but  a  very 
active  agent  in  the  spread  of  knowledge 
and  taste  ?  Some  forms  of  stage  work, 
you  may  say,  are  not  particularly  elevat- 
ing. True  ;  and  there  are  countless  fic- 
tions coming  daily  from  the  hands  of 
printer  and  publisher  which  nobody  is 
the  better  for  reading.     You  cannot  have 

93 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

a  fixed  standard  of  value  in  my  art; 
and  though  there  are  masses  of  people 
who  will  prefer  an  unintelligent  exhibi- 
tion to  a  really  artistic  production,  that 
is  no  reason  for  decrying  the  theatre,  in 
which  all  the  arts  blend  with  the  knowl- 
edge of  history,  manners,  and  customs 
of  all  people,  and  scenes  of  all  climes,  to 
afford  a  varied  entertainment  to  the  most 
exacting  intellect.  I  have  no  sympathy 
with  people  who  are  constantly  anxious 
to  define  the  actor's  position,  for,  as  a 
rule,  they  are  not  animated  by  a  desire 
to  promote  his  interests.  '"Tis  in  our- 
selves that  we  are  thus  and  thus  ;  "  and 
whatever  actors  deserve,  socially  or 
artistically,  they  are  sure  to  receive  as 
their  right.  I  found  the  other  day  in  a 
well-circulated  little  volume  a  sugges- 
tion that  the  actor  was  a  degraded  being 
because  he  has  a  closely-shaven  face. 
This  is,  indeed,  humiliating,  and  I  won- 
der how  it  strikes  the  Roman  Catholic 
94 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

clergy.  However,  there  are  actors  who 
do  not  shave  closely,  and  though,  alas  ! 
I  am  not  one  of  them,  I  wish  them  joy 
of  the  spiritual  grace  which  I  cannot 
claim. 

It  is  admittedly  unfortunate  for  the 
stage  that  it  has  a  certain  equivocal 
element,  which,  in  the  eyes  of  some 
judges,  is  sufficient  for  its  condemna- 
tion. The  art  is  open  to  all,  and  it  has 
to  bear  the  sins  of  many.  You  may 
open  your  newspaper,  and  see  a  para- 
graph headed  ' '  Assault  by  an  Actress. " 
Some  poor  creature  is  dignified  by  that 
title  who  has  not  the  slightest  claim  to 
it.  You  look  into  a  shop-window  and 
see  photographs  of  certain  people  who 
are  indiscriminately  described  as  actors 
and  actresses  though  their  business  has 
no  pretence  to  be  art  of  any  kind. 

I  was  told  in  Baltimore  of  a  man  in  that 
city  who  was  so  diverted  by  the  perform- 
ance of  Tyrone  Powar,  the  popular  Irish 

95 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

comedian,  that  he  laughed  uproariously 
till  the  audience  was  convulsed  with  mer- 
riment at  the  spectacle.  As  soon  as  he 
could  speak,  he  called  out,  "Do  be  quiet, 
Mr.  Showman  ;  do'ee  hold  your  tongue, 
or  I  shall  die  of  laughter  !  "  This  idea 
that  the  actor  is  a  showman  still  lingers  ; 
but  no  one  with  any  real  appreciation  of 
the  best  elements  of  the  drama  applies 
this  vulgar  standard  to  a  great  body  of 
artists.  The  fierce  light  of  publicity  that 
beats  upon  us  makes  us  liable,  from  time 
to  time,  to  dissertations  upon  our  public 
and  private  lives,  our  manners,  our  mor- 
als, and  our  money.  Our  whims  and 
caprices  are  discanted  on  with  apparent 
earnestness  of  truth,  and  seeming  sin- 
cerity of  conviction.  There  is  always 
some  lively  controversy  concerning  the 
influence  of  the  stage.  The  battle  be- 
tween old  methods  and  new  in  art  is 
waged  everywhere.  If  an  actor  were  to 
take  to  heart  everything  that  is  written 
96 


THE      ART     OF     ACTING 

and  said  about  him,  his  life  would  be  an 
intolerable  burden.  And  one  piece  of  ad- 
vice I  should  give  to  young  actors  is  this  : 
Do  not  be  too  sensitive ;  receive  praise 
or  censure  with  modesty  and  patience. 
Good  honest  criticism  is,  of  course,  most 
advantageous  to  an  actor  ;  but  he  should 
save  himself  from  the  indiscriminate 
reading  of  a  multitude  of  comments, 
which  may  only  confuse  instead  of  stim- 
ulating. And  here  let  me  say  to  young 
actors  in  all  earnestness  :  Beware  of  the 
loungers  of  our  calling,  the  camp  fol- 
lowers who  hang  on  the  skirts  of  the 
army,  and  who  inveigle  the  young  into 
habits  that  degrade  their  character,  and 
paralyze  their  ambition.  Let  your  ambi- 
tion be  ever  precious  to  you,  and,  next 
to  your  good  name,  the  jewel  of  your 
souls.  I  care  nothing  for  the  actor  who 
is  not  always  anxious  to  rise  to  the  high- 
est position  in  his  particular  walk ;  but 
this  ideal  cannot  be   cherished  by  the 

97 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

young  man  who  is  induced  to  fritter  away 
his  time  and  his  mind  in  thoughtless 
company. 

But  in  the  midst  of  all  this  turmoil  about 
the  stage,  one  fact  stands  out  clearly  : 
the  dramatic  art  is  steadily  growing  in 
credit  with  the  educated  classes.  It  is 
drawing  more  recruits  from  those  classes. 
The  enthusiasm  for  our  calling  has  never 
reached  a  higher  pitch.  There  is  quite 
an  extraordinary  number  of  ladies  who 
want  to  become  actresses,  and  the  cardinal 
difficulty  in  the  way  is  not  the  social 
deterioration  which  some  people  think 
they  would  incur,  but  simply  their  in- 
ability to  act.  Men  of  education  who 
become  actors  do  not  find  that  their 
education  is  useless.  If  they  have  the 
necessary  aptitude — the  inborn  instinct 
for  the  stage — all  their  mental  training 
will  be  of  great  value  to  them.  It  is  true 
that  there  must  always  be  grades  in  the 
theatre,  that  an  educated  man  who  is  an 
98 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

indifferent  actor  can  never  expect  to  reach 
the  front  rank.  If  he  do  no  more  than 
figure  in  the  army  at  Bosworth  Field,  or 
look  imposing  in  a  doorway  ;  if  he  never 
play  any  but  the  smallest  parts  ;  if  in 
these  respects  he  be  no  better  than  men 
who  could  not  pass  an  examination  in  any 
branch  of  knowledge — he  has  no  more 
reason  to  complain  than  the  highly-edu- 
cated man  who  longs  to  write  poetry, 
and  possesses  every  qualification — save 
the  poetic  faculty.  There  are  people 
who  seem  to  think  that  only  irresistible 
genius  justifies  any  one  in  adopting  the 
stage  as  a  vocation.  They  make  it  an  ar- 
gument against  the  profession  that  many 
enter  it  from  a  low  sphere  of  life,  with- 
out any  particular  fitness  for  acting,  but 
simply  to  earn  a  livelihood  by  doing 
the  subordinate  and  mechanical  work 
which  is  necessary  in  every  theatre.  And 
so  men  and  women  of  refinement — es- 
pecially women — are  warned  that  they 

99 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

must  do  themselves  injury  by  passing 
through  the  rank  and  file  during  their 
term  of  probation  in  the  actors'  craft. 
Now,  I  need  not  remind  you  that  on  the 
stage  everybody  cannot  be  great,  any 
more  than  students  of  music  can  all  be- 
come great  musicians  ;  but  very  many 
will  do  sound  artistic  work  which  is  of 
great  value.  As  for  any  question  of  con- 
duct. Heaven  forbid  that  I  should  be  dog- 
matic ;  but  it  does  not  seem  to  me  logi- 
cal that  while  genius  is  its  own  law  in  the 
pursuit  of  a  noble  art,  all  inferior  merit 
or  ambition  is  to  be  deterred  from  the 
same  path  by  appalling  pictures  of  its 
temptations. 

If  our  art  is  worth  anything  at  all,  it 
is  worth  the  honest,  conscientious  self- 
devotion  of  men  and  women  who,  while 
they  may  not  achieve  fame,  may  have 
the  satisfaction  of  being  workers  in  a  call- 
ing which  does  credit  to  many  degrees  of 
talent.     We  do  not  claim  to  be  any  better 

lOO 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

than  our  fellows  in  other  walks  of  life. 
We  do  not  ask  the  jester  in  journalism 
whether  his  quips  and  epigrams  are  al- 
ways dictated  by  the  loftiest  morality  ; 
nor  do  we  insist  on  knowing  that  the 
odor  of  sanctity  surrounds  the  private 
lives  of  lawyers  and  military  men  before 
we  send  our  sons  into  law  and  the  army. 
It  is  impossible  to  point  out  any  vocation 
which  is  not  attended  by  temptations 
that  prove  fatal  to  many ;  but  you  have 
simply  to  consider  whether  a  profession 
has  in  itself  any  title  to  honor,  and  then 
— if  you  are  confident  of  your  capacity — 
to  enter  it  with  a  resolve  to  do  all  that 
energy  and  perseverance  can  accomplish. 
The  immortal  part  of  the  stage  is  its 
nobler  part.  Ignoble  accidents  and  in- 
terludes come  and  go,  but  this  lasts  on 
forever.  It  lives,  like  the  human  soul, 
in  the  body  of  humanity — associated  with 
much  that  is  inferior,  and  hampered  by 
many  hindrances  ;  but  it  never  sinks  into 

lOI 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

nothingness,  and  never  fails  to  find  new 
and  noble  work  in  creations  of  permanent 
and  memorable  excellence.  And  I  would 
say,  as  a  last  word,  to  the  young  men  in 
this  assembly  who  may  at  any  time  re- 
solve to  enter  the  dramatic  profession, 
that  they  ought  always  to  fix  their  minds 
upon  the  highest  examples ;  that  in  study- 
ing acting  they  should  beware  of  prej- 
udiced comparisons  between  this  method 
and  that,  but  learn  as  much  as  possible 
from  all ;  that  they  should  remember  that 
art  is  as  varied  as  nature,  and  as  little 
suited  to  the  shackles  of  a  school ;  and, 
above  all,  that  they  should  never  forget 
that  excellence  in  any  art  is  attained  only 
by  arduous  labor,  unswerving  purpose, 
and  unfailing  discipline.  This  discipline 
is,  perhaps,  the  most  difficult  of  all  tests, 
for  it  involves  the  subordination  of  the 
actor's  personality  in  every  work  which 
is  designed  to  be  a  complete  and  harmo- 
nious picture.  Dramatic  art  nowadays 
1 02 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

is  more  coherent,  systematic,  and  com- 
prehensive than  it  has  sometimes  been. 
And  to  the  student  who  proposes  to  fill 
the  place  in  this  system  to  which  his  in- 
dividuahty  and  experience  entitle  him, 
and  to  do  his  duty  faithfully  and  well, 
ever  striving  after  greater  excellence,  and 
never  yielding  to  the  indolence  that 
is  often  born  of  popularity — to  him  I 
say,  with  every  confidence,  that  he  will 
choose  a  career  in  which,  if  it  does 
not  lead  him  to  fame,  he  will  be  sus- 
tained by  the  honorable  exercise  of 
some  of  the  best  faculties  of  the  human 
mind. 

And  now  I  can  only  thank  you  for  the 
patience  with  which  you  have  listened 
while,  in  a  slight  and  imperfect  way,  I 
have  dwelt  with  some  of  the  most  im- 
portant of  the  actor's  responsibilities.  I 
have  been  an  actor  for  nearly  thirty  years, 
and  what  I  have  told  you  is  the  fruit  of 
my  experience,  and  of  an   earnest   and 

103 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

conscientious  belief  that  the   calling  to 
which   I    am  proud   to   belong   is 
worthy  of  the  sympathy  and 
support  of  all  intelli- 
gent   people. 
104 


ADDRESS 

AT  THE  UNIVERSITY  OF 
OXFORD 

26  JUNE 
1886 


ADDRESS  AT  THE 


UNIVERSITY    OF    OXFORD. 

HEN  I  was  honored  by 
the  request  of  your  dis- 
tinguished Vice-Chancel- 
lor to  deliver  an  address 
before  the  members  of 
this  great  University,  I 
told  him  I  could  only  say  something 
about  my  own  calling,  for  that  I  knew 
little  or  nothing  about  anything  else.  I 
trust,  however,  that  this  confession  of  the 
limitations  of  my  knowledge  will  not 
prejudice  me  in  your  eyes,  members  as 
you  are — privileged  members  I  may  say 
— of  this  seat  of  learning.  In  an  age 
when  so  many  persons  think  they  know 
everything,  it  may  afford  a  not  unpleas- 

107 


FOUR     GREAT    ACTORS 

ing  variety  to  meet  with  some  who  know 
that  they  know  nothing, 

I  cannot  discourse  to  you,  even  if  you 
wished  me  to  do  so,  of  the  respective 
merits  of  ^Eschylus,  Sophocles,  and  Eu- 
ripides ;  for  if  I  did,  I  should  not  be  able  to 
tell  you  anything  that  you  do  not  know 
already.  I  have  not  had  the  advantage 
— one  that  very  few  of  the  members  of 
my  profession  in  past,  or  even  in  present 
times  have  enjoyed — of  an  University 
education.  The  only  Alma  Mater  I  ever 
knew  was  the  hard  stage  of  a  country 
theatre. 

In  the  course  of  my  training,  long  be- 
fore I  had  taken,  what  I  may  call,  my 
degree  in  London,  I  came  to  act  in  your 
city.  I  have  a  very  pleasant  recollection 
of  the  time  I  passed  here,  though  I  am 
sorry  to  say  that,  owing  to  the  regulation 
which  forbade  theatrical  performances 
during  term  time,  I  saw  Oxford  only  in 
vacation,  which  is  rather  like — to  use  the 
1 08 


FOUR     GREAT    ACTORS 

old  illustration — seeing  Hamlet  with  the 
part  of  Hamlet  left  out.  There  was  then 
no  other  building  available  for  dramatic 
representations  than  the  Town  Hall.  I 
may,  perhaps,  be  allowed  to  congratulate 
you  on  the  excellent  theatre  which  you 
now  possess — I  do  not  mean  the  Sheldon- 
ian — and  at  the  same  time  to  express  a 
hope  that,  as  a  more  liberal,  and  might  I 
say  a  wiser,  regime  allows  the  members 
of  the  University  to  go  to  the  play,  they 
will  not  receive  any  greater  moral  injury, 
or  be  distracted  any  more  from  their 
studies,  than  when  they  were  only  al- 
lowed the  occasional  relaxation  of  hearing 
comic  songs.  Macready  once  said  that 
* '  a  theatre  ought  to  be  a  place  of  recrea- 
tion for  the  sober-minded  and  intelligent. " 
I  trust  that,  under  whatsoever  manage- 
ment the  theatre  in  Oxford  may  be,  it 
will  always  deserve  this  character. 

You  must  not  expect  any  learned  dis- 
quisition from  me ;  nor  even  in  the  modi- 

109 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

fied  sense  in  which  the  word  is  used 
among  you  will  I  venture  to  style  what  I 
am  going  to  say  to  you  a  lecture.  You 
may,  by  the  way,  have  seen  a  report 
that  I  was  cast  lor  four  lectures  ;  but  I  as- 
sure you  there  was  no  ground  for  such 
an  alarming  rumor  ;  a  rumor  quite  as 
alarming  to  me  as  it  could  have  been  to 
you.  What  I  do  propose  is,  to  say  to 
you  something  about  four  of  our  greatest 
actors  in  the  past,  each  of  whom  may  be 
termed  the  representative  of  an  impor- 
tant period  in  the  Annals  of  our  National 
Drama.  In  turning  over  the  leaves  of  a 
history  of  the  life  of  Edmund  Kean,  I 
came  across  the  following  sentence  (the 
writer  is  speaking  of  Edmund  Kean  as 
having  restored  Nature  to  the  stage)  : 
"There  seems  always  to  have  been 
this  alternation  between  the  Schools  of 
Nature  and  Art  (if  we  may  so  term  them) 
in  the  annals  of  the  English  Theatre." 
Now  if  for  Art  I  may  be  allowed  to 
no 


FOUR     GREAT    ACTORS 

substitute  Artificiality ,  which  is  what  the 
author  really  meant,  I  think  that  hio  sen- 
tence is  an  epitome  of  the  history  of  our 
stage ;  and  it  struck  me  at  once  that  I 
could  not  select  anything  more  appro- 
priate— I  will  not  say  as  a  text,  for  that 
sounds  as  if  I  were  going  to  deliver  a 
sermon — but  as  the  motif,  or  theme  of  the 
remarks  I  am  about  to  address  to  you. 
The  four  actors  of  whom  I  shall  attempt 
to  tell  you  something — Burbage,  Better- 
ton,  Garrick,  and  Kean — were  the  four 
greatest  champions,  in  their  respective 
times,  on  the  stage  of  Nature  in  contra- 
distinction to  Artificiality. 

When  we  consider  the  original  of  the 
Drama,  or  perhaps  I  should  say  of  the 
higher  class  of  Drama,  we  see  that  the 
style  of  acting  must  necessarily  have 
been  artificial  rather  than  natural.  Take 
the  Greek  Tragedy,  for  instance  :  the 
actors,  as  you  know,  wore  masks,  and 
had  to  speak,  or  rather  intone,  in  a  thea- 

III 


FOUR     GREAT     ACTORS 

tre  more  than  half  open  to  the  air,  and 
therefore  it  was  impossible  they  could 
employfacial  expression,  or  much  variety 
of  intonation.  We  have  not  time  now  to 
trace  at  length  the  many  vicissitudes  in 
the  career  of  the  Drama,  but  I  may  say 
that  Shakespeare  was  the  first  dramatist 
who  dared  to  rob  Tragedy  of  her  stilts  ; 
and  who  successfully  introduced  an  ele- 
ment of  comedy  which  was  not  dragged 
in  by  the  neck  and  heels,  but  which  nat- 
urally evolved  itself  from  the  treatment 
of  the  tragic  story,  and  did  not  violate 
the  consistency  of  any  character. 

It  was  not  only  with  regard  to  the 
writing  of  his  plays  that  Shakespeare 
sought  to  fight  the  battle  of  Nature 
against  Artificiality.  However  naturally 
he  might  write,  the  affected  or  monoto- 
nous delivery  of  his  verse  by  the  actors 
would  neutralize  all  his  efforts.  The  old 
rhyming  ten-syllable  lines  could  not  but 
lead  to  a  monotonous  style  of  elocution, 

112 


FOUR     GREAT    ACTORS 

nor  was  the  early  blank  verse  much  im- 
provement in  this  respect ;  but  Shake- 
speare fitted  his  blank  verse  to  the  natu- 
ral expression  of  his  ideas,  and  not  his 
ideas  to  the  trammels  of  blank  verse. 

In  order  to  carry  out  these  reforms,  in 
order  to  dethrone  Artifice  and  Affectation, 
he  needed  the  help  of  actors  in  whom  he 
could  trust,  and  especially  of  a  leading 
actor  who  could  interpret  his  greatest 
dramatic  creations  ;  such  a  one  he  found 
in  Richard  Burbage. 

Shakespeare  came  to  London  first  in 
1585.  Whether  on  this,  his  first  visit,  he 
became  connected  with  the  theatres  is 
uncertain.  At  any  rate  it  is  most  prob- 
able that  he  saw  Burbage  in  some  of  his 
favorite  characters,  and  perhaps  made 
his  acquaintance  ;  being  first  employed 
as  a  kind  of  servant  in  the  theatre,  and 
afterwards  as  a  player  of  inferior  parts. 
It  was  not  until  about  1 591-1592,  that 
Shakespeare  began  to  turn  his  attention 

113 


FOUR     GREAT     ACTORS 

seriously  to  dramatic  authorship.  For 
five  years  of  his  life  we  are  absolutely 
without  any  evidence  as  to  what  were 
his  pursuits.  But  there  can  be  little  doubt 
that  during  this  interval  he  was  virtually 
undergoing  a  special  form  of  education, 
consisting  rather  of  the  study  of  human 
nature  than  that  of  books,  and  was  ac- 
quiring the  art  of  dramatic  construction — 
learnt  better  in  a  theatre  than  anywhere 
else.  Unfortunately,  we  have  no  record 
of  the  intercourse  between  Shakespeare 
and  Burbage  ;  but  there  can  be  little  doubt 
that  between  the  dramatist,  who  was  him- 
self an  actor,  and  the  actor,  who  gave 
life  to  the  greatest  creations  of  his  imagi- 
nation, and  who,  probably,  amazed  no 
less  than  delighted  the  great  master  by 
the  vividness  and  power  of  his  imper- 
sonations, there  must  have  existed  a  close 
friendship.  Shakespeare,  unlike  most  men 
of  genius,  was  no  bad  man  of  business  ; 
and,  indeed,  a  friend  of  mine,  who  prides 
114 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

himself  upon  being  a  practical  man,  once 
suggested  that  he  selected  the  part  of 
the  Ghost  in  Hamlet  because  it  enabled 
him  to  go  in  front  of  the  house  between 
the  acts  and  count  the  money.  Burbage 
was  universally  acknowledged  as  the 
greatest  tragic  actor  of  his  time.  In  Bar- 
tholomew Fair,  Ben  Jonson  uses  Burbage's 
name  as  a  synonym  for  "  the  best  actor"  ; 
and  Bishop  Corbet,  in  his  Her  Boreale, 
tells  us  that  his  host  at  Leicester — 

"  when  he  would  have  said  King  Richard  died, 
And  call'd,  '  A  horse  !  A  horse ! '  he,  Burbage,  cried," 

In  a  scene,  in  which  Burbage  and  the 
comedian  Kemp  (the  J.  L.  Toole  of  the 
Shakespearean  period)  are  introduced 
in  The  Return  from  Parnassus — a  satirical 
play,  as  you  may  know,  written  by  some 
of  the  Members  of  St.  John's  College, 
Cambridge,  for  performance  by  them- 
selves on  New  Year's  Day,  1602 — we  have 
proof  of  the  high  estimation  in  which  the 

115 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

great  tragic  actor  was  held.  Kemp  says 
to  the  scholars  who  are  anxious  to  try 
their  fortunes  on  the  stage  :  "But  be  merry, 
my  lads,  you  have  happened  upon  the 
most  excellent  vocation  in  the  world  for 
money  ;  they  come  north  and  south  to 
bring  it  to  our  playhouse  ;  and  for  honors, 
who  of  more  report  than  Dick  Burhage 
and  Will  Kempe ;  he  is  not  counted  a 
gentleman  that  knows  not  Dick  Burhage 
and  Will  Kempe;  there's  not  a  country 
wench  that  can  dance  '  Sellenger's 
Round,'  but  can  talke  of  Dick  Burhage 
and  Will  Kempe." 

That  Burbage's  fame  as  an  actor  out- 
lived his  life  may  be  seen  from  the  de- 
scription given  by  Flecknoe: — 

"  He  was  a  delightful  Proteus,  so  wholly 
transforming  himself  into  his  part,  and 
putting  off  himself  with  his  clothes,  as  he 
never  (not  so  much  as  in  the  'tiring  house) 
assumed  himself  again  until  the  play  was 
done.  .  .  .  He  had  all  the  parts  of  an  ex- 
ii6 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

cellent  orator,  animating  his  words  with 
speaking-,  and  speech  with  acting,  his  au- 
ditors being  never  more  delighted  than 
when  he  spake,  nor  more  sorry  than  when 
he  held  his  peace.  Yet  even  then  he  was 
an  excellent  actor  still,  never  failing  in 
his  part  when  he  had  done  speaking,  but 
with  his  looks  and  gestures  maintaining 
it  still  to  the  height." 

It  is  not  my  intention,  even  if  time 
permitted,  to  go  much  into  the  private 
life  of  the  four  actors  of  whom  I  propose 
to  speak.  Very  little  is  known  of  Bur- 
bage's  private  life,  except  that  he  was 
married ;  perhaps  Shakespeare  and  he 
may  have  been  drawn  nearer  together  by 
the  tie  of  a  common  sorrow  ;  for,  as  the 
poet  lost  his  beloved  son  Hamlet  when 
quite  a  child,  so  did  Burbage  lose  his 
eldest  son  Richard.  Burbage  died  on 
March  13th,  161 7,  being  then  about  50 
years  of  age:  Camden,  in  his  Annals  of 
James  /.,  records  his  death,  and  calls  him 

117 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

a  second  Roscius.  He  was  sincerely 
mourned  by  all  those  who  loved  the  dra- 
matic art ;  and  he  numbered  among  his 
friends  Shakespeare,  Ben  Jonson,  Beau- 
mont, and  Fletcher,  and  other  "common 
players,"  whose  names  were  destined  to 
become  the  most  honored  in  the  annals 
of  English  literature.  Burbage  was  the 
first  great  actor  that  England  ever  saw, 
the  original  representative  of  many  of 
Shakespeare's  noblest  creations,  among 
others,  of  Shylock,  Richard,  Romeo, 
Hamlet,  Lear,  Othello,  and  Macbeth. 
We  may  fairly  conclude  Burbage's  acting 
to  have  had  all  the  best  characteristics  of 
Natural,  as  opposed  to  Artificial  acting. 
The  principles  of  the  former  are  so  clearly 
laid  down  by  Shakespeare,  in  Hamlet's 
advice  to  the  players,  that,  perhaps,  I 
cannot  do  better  than  to  repeat  them  : — 

Speak  the  speech,  I  pray  you,  as  I  pronounced  it 
to  you,   trippingly  on  the  tongue :  but  if  you  mouth 
it,  as  many  of  your  players  do,  I  had  as  lief  the 
ii8 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

town-crier  spoke  my  lines.  Nor  do  not  saw  the  air 
too  much  with  your  hand,  thus,  but  use  all  gently ; 
for  in  the  very  torrent,  tempest,  and,  as  I  may  say, 
the  whirlwind  of  passion,  you  must  acquire  and 
beget  a  temperance  that  may  give  it  smoothness. 
O,  it  offends  me  to  the  soul  to  hear  a  robustious 
periwig-pated  fellow  tear  a  passion  to  tatters,  to  very 
rags,  to  split  the  ears  of  the  groundlings,  who  for 
the  most  part  are  capable  of  nothing  but  inexplica- 
ble dumb-show  and  noise :  I  would  have  such  a 
fellow  whipped  for  o'erdoing  Termagant ;  it  out- 
herods  Herod ;  pray  you,  avoid  it.  Be  not  too 
tame  neither,  but  let  your  own  discretion  be  your 
tutor ;  suit  the  action  to  the  word,  the  word  to  the 
action  ;  with  this  special  observance,  that  you  o'er- 
step  not  the  modesty  of  nature :  for  anything  so 
overdone  is  from  the  purpose  of  playing,  whose  end, 
both  at  the  first  and  now,  was  and  is,  to  hold,  as 
'twere,  the  mirror  up  to  nature  ;  to  show  virtue  her 
own  feature,  scorn  her  own  image,  and  the  very  age 
and  body  of  the  time  his  form  and  pressure.  Now 
this  overdone,  or  come  tardy  off,  though  it  make 
the  unskilful  laugh,  cannot  but  make  the  judicious 
grieve  ;  the  censure  of  the  which  one  must  in  your 
allowance  o'erweigh  a  whole  theatre  of  others.  O, 
there  be  players  that  I  have  seen  play,  and  heard 
others  praise,  and  that  highly,  not  to  speak  it  pro- 
fanely, that,  neither  having  the  accent  of  Christians 

119 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

nor  the  gait  of  Christian,  pagan,  nor  man,  have  so 
strutted  and  bellowed  that  I  have  thought  some  of 
Nature's  journeymen  had  made  men  and  not  made 
them  well,  they  imitated  humanity  so  abominably. 

When  we  try  to  picture  what  the 
theatre  in  Shakespeare's  time  was  like,  it 
strikes  us  that  it  must  have  been  difficult 
to  carry  out  those  principles.  One  would 
think  it  must  have  been  almost  impossi- 
ble for  the  actors  to  keep  up  the  illusion 
of  the  play,  surrounded  as  they  were 
by  such  distracting  elements.  Figure  to 
yourselves  a  crowd  of  fops,  chattering 
like  a  flock  of  daws,  carrying  their  stools 
in  their  hands,  and  settling  around,  and 
sometimes  upon  the  stage  itself,  with  as 
much  noise  as  possible.  To  vindicate 
their  importance  in  their  own  eyes  they 
kept  up  a  constant  jangling  of  petty, 
carping  criticism  on  the  actors  and  the 
play.  In  the  intervals  of  repose  which 
they  allowed  their  tongues,  they  ogled 
the  ladies  in  the  boxes,  and  made  a  point 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

of  vindicating  the  dignity  of  their  intel- 
lects by  being  always  most  inattentive 
during  the  most  pathetic  portions  of  the 
play.  In  front  of  the  house  matters  were 
little  better :  the  orange  girls  going  to 
and  fro  among  the  audience,  interchang- 
ing jokes — iiot  of  the  most  delicate 
character — with  the  young  sparks  and 
apprentices,  the  latter  cracking  nuts  or 
howling  down  some  unfortunate  actor 
who  had  offended  their  worships  ;  some- 
times pipes  of  tobacco  were  being  smoked. 
Picture  all  this  confusion,  and  add  the 
fact  that  the  female  characters  of  the 
play  were  represented  by  shrill-voiced 
lads  or  half-shaven  men.  Imagine  an 
actor  having  to  invest  such  representa- 
tives with  all  the  girlish  passion  of  a 
Juliet,  the  womanly  tenderness  of  a  Des- 
demona,  or  the  pitiable  anguish  of  a  dis- 
traught Ophelia,  and  you  cannot  but 
realize  how  difficult  under  such  circum- 
stances great  acting  must  have  been.     In 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

fact,  while  we  are  awe-struck  by  the 
wonderful  mtellectuality  of  the  best 
dramas  of  the  Elizabethan  period,  we 
cannot  help  feeling  that  certain  subtleties 
of  acting,  elaborate  by-play,  for  instance, 
and  the  finer  lights  and  shades  of  intona- 
tion, must  have  been  impossible.  Reci- 
tation rather  than  impersonation  would 
be  generally  aimed  at  by  the  actors. 

Thomas  Betterton  was  the  son  of  one 
of  the  cooks  of  King  Charles  I.  He  was 
born  in  Tothill  Street,  Westminster, 
about  1635,  eighteen  years  after  the 
death  of  Burbage.  He  seems  to  have 
received  a  fair  education ;  indeed,  but 
for  the  disturbing  effect  of  the  Civil  War, 
he  would  probably  have  been  brought 
up  to  one  of  the  liberal  professions.  He 
was,  however,  apprenticed  to  a  book- 
seller, who,  fortunately  for  Betterton, 
took  to  theatrical  management.  Better- 
ton  was  about  twenty-four  years  old 
when  he  began  his  dramatic  career. 
122 


FOUR     GREAT    ACTORS 

For  upwards  of  fifty  years  he  seems  to 
have  held  his  position  as  the  foremost 
actor  of  the  day.  It  was  fortunate,  in- 
deed, for  the  interests  of  the  Drama  that 
so  great  an  actor  arose  at  the  very  time 
when  dramatic  art  had,  as  it  were,  to  be 
resuscitated.  Directly  the  Puritans  (who 
hated  the  stage  and  every  one  connected 
with  it  as  heartily  as  they  hated  their 
Cavalier  neighbors)  came  into  power, 
they  abolished  the  theatres,  as  they  did 
every  other  form  of  intellectual  amuse- 
ment ;  and  for  many  years  the  Drama 
only  existed  in  the  form  of  a  few  vulgar 
"Drolls,"  It  must  have  been,  indeed,  a 
dismal  time  for  the  people  of  England ; 
with  all  the  horrors  of  civil  war  fresh  in 
their  memory,  the  more  than  paternal 
government  allowed  its  subjects  no  other 
amusement  than  that  of  consigning  their 
neighbors  to  eternal  damnation,  and  of 
selecting  for  themselves — by  anticipation 
— all  the  best  reserved  seats  in  heaven. 

123 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

When  the  Restoration  took  place,  the 
inevitable  reaction  followed  :  society, 
having  been  condemned  to  a  lengthened 
period  of  an  involuntary  piety — which 
sat  anything  but  easily  on  it — rushed 
into  the  other  extreme  ;  all  who  wanted 
to  be  in  the  fashion  professed  but  little 
morality,  and  it  is  to  be  feared  that,  for 
once  in  a  way,  their  practice  did  not 
come  short  of  their  profession.  Now 
was  the  time  when,  instead  of  *  *  poor 
players,"  "fine  gentlemen  "condescend- 
ed to  write  for  the  stage  ;  and  it  may  be 
remarked  that  as  long  as  the  literary  in- 
terests of  the  theatre  were  in  their  keep- 
ing, the  tone  of  the  plays  represented 
was  more  corrupt  than  it  ever  was  at  any 
other  period  of  the  history  of  the  Drama. 
It  is  something  to  be  thankful  for,  that  at 
such  a  time,  when  the  highly-flavored 
comedies  of  Wycherley  and  Congreve 
were  all  the  vogue,  and  when  the  monot- 
onous profligacy  of  nearly  all  the  char- 
124 


FOUR     GREAT    ACTORS 

acters  introduced  into  those  plays  was 
calculated  to  encourage  the  most  artifi- 
cial style  of  acting — it  was  something,  I 
say,  to  be  thankful  for,  that  at  such  a 
time,  Betterton,  and  one  or  two  other 
actors,  could  infuse  life  into  the  noblest 
creations  of  Shakespeare.  Owing,  more 
especially,  to  Betterton 's  great  powers, 
the  tragedy  of  Hamlet  held  its  own  in 
popularity,  even  against  such  witty  pro- 
ductions as  Love  for  Love.  It  was  also 
fortunate  that  the  same  actor  who  could 
draw  tears  as  Hamlet,  was  equally  at 
home  in  the  feigned  madness  of  that 
amusing  rake  Valentine,  or  in  the  some- 
what coarse  humor  of  Sir  John  Brute. 
By  charming  the  public  in  what  were  the 
popular  novelties  of  the  day,  he  was 
able  to  command  their  support  when  he 
sought  it  for  a  nobler  form  of  Drama. 
He  married  an  actress,  Mrs.  Saunderson, 
who  was  only  inferior  in  her  art  to  her 
husband.     Their  married  life  seems   to 

125 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

have  been  one  of  perfect  happiness. 
When  one  hears  so  much  of  the  profli- 
gacy of  actors  and  actresses,  and  that 
they  are  all  such  a  very  wicked  lot,  it  is 
pleasant  to  think  of  this  couple,  in  an 
age  proverbial  for  its  immorality,  in  a 
city  where  the  highest  in  rank  set  an  ex- 
ample of  shameless  licence,  living  their 
quiet,  pure,  artistic  life,  respected  and 
beloved  by  all  that  knew  them. 

Betterton  had  few  physical  advantages. 
If  we  are  to  believe  Antony  Aston,  one 
of  his  contemporaries,  he  had  "a  short, 
thick  neck,  stooped  in  the  shoulders,  and 
had  fat,  short  arms,  which  he  rarely 
lifted  higher  than  his  stomach.  His  left 
hand  frequently  lodged  in  his  breast, 
between  his  coat  and  waistcoat,  while 
with  his  right  hand  he  prepared  his 
speech."  Yet  the  same  critic  is  obliged 
to  confess  that,  at  seventy  years  of  age, 
a  yoiuiger  man  might  have  personated 
but  could  not  have  acted,  Hamlet  better. 
126 


FOUR     GREAT    ACTORS 

He  calls  his  voice  "low  and  grumbling," 
but  confesses  that  he  had  such  power 
over  it  that  he  could  enforce  attention 
even  from  fops  and  orange-girls.  I  dare 
say  you  all  know  how  Steele  and 
Addison  admired  his  acting,  and  how 
enthusiastically  they  spoke  of  it  in  The 
Tatler.  The  latter  writes  eloquently  of 
the  wonderful  agony  of  jealousy  and  the 
tenderness  of  love  which  he  showed  in 
Othello,  and  of  the  immense  effect  he 
produced  in  Hamlet. 

Betterton,  like  all  really  great  men, 
was  a  hard  worker.  Pepys  says  of  him, 
"Betterton  is  a  very  sober,  serious  man, 
and  studious,  and  humble,  following  of 
his  studies  ;  and  is  rich  already  with 
what  he  gets  and  saves."  Alas  !  the 
fortune  so  hardly  earned  was  lost  in  an 
unlucky  moment :  he  entrusted  it  to  a 
friend  to  invest  in  a  commercial  venture 
in  the  East  Indies  which  failed  most 
signally.      Betterton    never    reproached 

127 


FOUR     GREAT    ACTORS 

his  friend,  he  never  murmured  at  his  ill- 
luck.  The  friend's  daughter  was  left  un- 
provided for  ;  but  Betterton  adopted  the 
child,  educated  her  for  the  stage,  and 
she  became  an  actress  of  merit,  and 
married  Bowman,  the  player,  afterwards 
known    as  "The    Father  of  the   Stage." 

In  Betterton's  day  there  were  no  long 
runs  of  pieces ;  but,  had  his  lot  been 
cast  in  these  times,  he  might  have  been 
compelled  to  perform,  say,  Hamlet  for 
three  hundred  or  four  hundred  nights  : 
for  the  rights  of  the  majority  are  entitled 
to  respect  in  other  affairs  besides  politics, 
and  if  the  theatre-going  public  demand  a 
play  (and  our  largest  theatres  only  hold  a 
limited  number)  the  manager  dare  not 
cause  annoyance  and  disappointment  by 
withdrawing  it. 

Like  Edmund  Kean,  Betterton  may  be 

said  to  have  died  upon  the  stage  ;  for  in 

April,  1710,  when  he  took  his  last  benefit, 

as   Melantius,    in    Beaumont    and   Flet- 

128 


FOUR     GREAT    ACTORS 

cher's  Maid's  Tragedy  (an  adaption  of 
which,  by  the  way,  was  played  by  Mac- 
ready  under  the  title  of  The  Bridal,)  he 
was  suffering  tortures  from  gout,  and  had 
almost  to  be  carried  to  his  dressing- 
room  ;  and  though  he  acted  the  part  with 
all  his  old  fire,  speaking  these  very 
appropriate  words  : — 

"  My  heart 
And  limbs  are  still  the  same,  ray  will  as  great, 
To  do  you  service," 

within  forty-eight  hours  he  was  dead. 
He  was  buried  in  the  Cloisters  of  West- 
minster Abbey  with  every  mark  of 
respect  and  honor. 

I  may  here  add  that  the  censure  said 
to  have  been  directed  against  Betterton 
for  the  introduction  of  scenery  is  the 
prototype  of  that  cry,  which  we  hear  so 
often  nowadays,  against  over-elabora- 
tion in  the  arrangements  of  the  stage. 
If  it  be  a   crime   against  good  taste  to 

129 


FOUR     GREAT    ACTORS 

endeavor  to  enlist  every  art  in  the 
service  of  the  stage,  and  to  heighten  the 
effect  of  noble  poetry  by  surrounding  it 
with  the  most  beautiful  and  appropriate 
accessories,  I  myself  must  plead  guilty 
to  that  charge ;  but  I  should  like  to 
point  out  that  every  dramatist  who  has 
ever  lived,  from  Shakespeare  down- 
wards, has  always  endeavored  to  get 
his  plays  put  upon  the  stage  with  as 
good  effect  and  as  handsome  appoint- 
ments as  possible. 

Indeed,  the  Globe  Theatre  was  burned 
down  during  the  first  performance  of 
King  Henry  VIII. ,  through  the  firing  off 
of  a  cannon  which  announced  the  arrival 
of  King  Henry.  Perhaps,  indeed,  some 
might  regard  this  as  a  judgment  against 
the  manager  for  such  an  attempt  at 
realism. 

It  was  seriously  suggested  to  me  by 
an  enthusiast  the  other  day,  that  cos- 
tumes of  his  own  time  should  be  used 
130 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

for  all  Shakespeare's  plays.  I  reflected 
a  little  on  the  suggestion,  and  then  I  put 
it  to  him  whether  the  characters  in 
Julius  CcBsar  or  in  Antony  and  Cleopatra 
dressed  in  doublet  and  hose  would  not 
look  rather  out  of  place.  He  answered, 
"He  had  never  thought  of  that."  In 
fact,  difficulties  almost  innumerable  must 
invariably  crop  up  if  we  attempt  to 
represent  plays  without  appropriate  cos- 
tume and  scenery,  the  aim  of  which  is  to 
realize  the  locale  of  the  action.  Some 
people  may  hold  that  paying  attention 
to  such  matters  necessitates  inattention 
to  the  acting  ;  but  the  majority  think  it 
does  not,  and  I  believe  that  they  are 
right.  What  would  Alma-Tadema  say, 
for  instance,  if  it  were  proposed  to  him 
that  in  a  picture  of  the  Roman  Amphi- 
theatre the  figures  should  be  painted  in 
the  costume  of  Spain  ?  I  do  not  think 
he  would  see  the  point  of  such  a  noble 
disregard  of  detail ;  and  why  should  he, 

131 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

unless  what  is  false  in  art  is  held  to  be 
higher  than  what  is  true  ? 

Little  more  than  thirty  years  were  to 
elapse  between  the  death  of  the  honored 
Betterton  and  the  appearance  of  David 
Garrick,  who  was  to  restore  Nature  once 
more  to  the  stage.  In  this  comparatively 
short  interval  progress  in  dramatic  affairs 
had  been  all  backward.  Shakespeare's 
advice  to  the  actors  had  been  neglected  ; 
earnest  passion,  affecting  pathos,  ever- 
varying  gestures,  telling  intonation  of 
voice,  and,  above  all,  that  complete 
identification  of  themselves  in  the  part 
they  represented — all  these  qualities, 
which  had  distinguished  the  acting  of 
Betterton,  had  given  way  to  noisy  rant, 
formal  and  affected  attitudes,  and  a 
heavy  stilted  style  of  declamation.  Bet- 
terton died  in  1710,  and  six  years  after, 
in  1 7 1 6,  Garrick  was  bom.  About  twenty 
years  after,  in  1737,  Samuel  Johnson  and 
his  friend  and  pupil,  David  Garrick,  set 
132 


FOUR     GREAT    ACTORS 

out  from  Lichfield  on  their  way  to  Lon- 
don. In  spite  of  the  differences  in  their 
ages,  and  their  relationship  of  master  and 
pupil,  a  hearty  friendship  had  sprung-  up 
between  them,  and  one  destined,  in  spite 
of  Johnson's  occasional  resentment  at 
the  actor's  success  in  life,  to  last  till  it 
was  ended  by  the  grave.  Much  of  John- 
son's occasional  harshness  and  almost 
contemptuous  attitude  towards  Garrick 
was,  I  fear,  the  result  of  the  conscious- 
ness that  his  old  pupil  had  thoroughly 
succeeded  in  life,  and  had  reached  the 
highest  goal  possible  in  the  career  which 
he  had  chosen  ;  while  he  himself,  though 
looked  up  to  as  the  greatest  scholar  of  his 
time,  was  conscious,  as  he  shows  us  in 
his  own  diary,  of  how  much  more  he 
might  have  done  but  for  his  constitutional 
indolence. 

Garrick's  family  was  of  French  origin, 
his  father  having  come  over  to  England 
during  the  persecution  of  the  Huguenots 

^33 


FOUR     GREAT    ACTORS 

in  1687,  and  on  his  mother's  side  he  had 
Irish  blood  in  his  veins ;  so  that  by 
descent  he  was  a  combination  of  French, 
English,  and  Irish,  a  combination  by  no 
means  unpromising  for  one  who  was 
going  to  be  an  actor. 

On  reaching  London,  Garrick  enrolled 
his  name  in  Lincoln's  Inn,  and  was  look- 
ing about  him  to  see  what  would  turn 
up,  when  the  news  of  his  fathers  death 
reached  him.  There  is  no  doubt  that,  if 
Garrick  had  consulted  his  own  wishes 
only,  he  would  at  once  have  gone  upon 
the  stage.  But  fortunately,  perhaps,  for 
his  future  career,  he  could  not  bear  to 
grieve  his  mother's  heart  by  adopting  at 
once,  and  at  such  a  time  when  she  was 
crushed  with  some  sorrow  for  her  great 
loss,  a  calling  which  he  knew  she  de- 
tested so  heartily. 

Within  a  year  Mrs.  Garrick  followed  to 
the  grave  the  husband  whom  she  never 
ceased  to  mourn,  and  David  had  nothing 
134 


FOUR     GREAT    ACTORS 

more  to  face  than  the  prejudice  of  his 
brother,  Peter,  and  of  his  sisters,  if  he 
should  resolve  ultimately  to  adopt  the 
profession  on  which  his  heart  was  fixed. 
It  was  not,  however,  till  nearly  three 
years  after,  in  1741,  that  Garrick,  deter- 
mined to  take  the  decisive  step,  first  feel- 
ing his  way  by  playing  Chamont  in  The 
Orphan,  and  Sir  Harry  Wildair,  at  Ips- 
wuch,  where  he  appeared  under  the  name 
of  Mr.  Lydall ;  and  under  this  same 
name,  in  the  same  year,  he  made  his 
first  appearance  at  Goodman's  Fields 
Theatre,  in  the  part  of  Richard  III.  His 
success  was  marvellous.  Considering 
the  small  experience  he  had  had,  no 
actor  ever  made  such  a  successful  dehut. 
No  doubt  by  waiting  and  exercising  his 
powers  of  observation,  and  by  studying 
many  parts  in  private,  he  had  to  a  cer- 
tain extent,  matured  his  powers.  But 
making  allowance  for  all  his  great  natural 
gifts,  there  is  no  denying  that  Garrick,  in 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

one  leap,  gained  a  position  which,  in  the 
case  of  most  other  actors,  has  only  been 
reached  through  years  of  toil.  He  seems 
to  have  charmed  all  classes  :  the  learned 
and  the  ignorant,  the  cultured  and  the 
vulgar ;  great  statesmen,  poets,  and  even 
the  fribbles  of  fashion  were  all  nearly 
unanimous  in  his  praise.  The  dissentient 
voices  were  so  few  that  they  were 
drowned  in  the  clamor  of  applause. 
Quinn  might  snarl  and  growl  ;  and 
Horace  Walpole,  who  seems  to  have 
grown  alarmed  at  so  much  of  the  incense 
of  praise  finding  its  way  to  the  nostrils 
of  another,  might  give  vent  to  a  few 
feeble  sneers  ;  such  as  when  he  said,  "I 
do  not  mention  the  things  written  in  his 
praise  because  he  writes  most  of  them 
himself. "  But  the  battle  was  won.  Na- 
ture in  the  place  of  Artificiality,  Origin- 
ality in  the  place  of  Conventionality,  had 
triumphed  on  the  stage  once  more. 

Consternation  reigned  in  the  home  at 
136 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

Lichfield  when  the  news  arrived  that 
brother  David  had  become  a  play-actor  ; 
but  ultimately  the  family  were  reconciled 
to  such  degradation  by  the  substantial 
results  of  the  experiment.  Such  rec- 
oncilements are  not  uncommon.  Some 
young  man  of  good  birth  and  position 
has  taken  to  the  stage ;  his  family,  who 
could  not  afford  to  keep  him,  have  been 
shocked,  and  in  pious  horror  have  cast 
him  out  of  their  respectable  circle ;  but 
at  last  success  has  come,  and  they  have 
managed  to  overcome  their  scruples  and 
prejudices  and  to  profit  by  the  harvest 
which  the  actor  has  reaped. 

Garrick  seems  to  have  continued  play- 
ing under  the  name  of  Lydall  for  two 
months,  though  the  secret  must  have 
been  an  open  one.  It  was  not  till 
December  the  second,  the  night  of  his 
benefit,  that  he  was  at  last  announced 
under  his  own  name  ;  and  henceforward 
his  career  was  one  long  triumph,  check- 

137 


FOUR     GREAT    ACTORS 

ered,  indeed,  by  disagreements,  quarrels 
and  heart-burnings  (for  Garrick  was  ex- 
tremely sensitive),  caused,  for  the  most 
part,  by  the  envy  and  jealousy  which 
invariably  dog  the  heels  of  success. 

Second-rate  actors,  like  Theophilus 
Gibber,  or  gnats  such  as  Murphy,  and 
others,  easily  stung  him.  He  was  lam- 
pooned as  "The  Sick  Monkey"  on  his 
return  to  the  stage  after  having  taken  a 
much  needed  rest.  But  discretion  and 
audacity  seemed  to  go  hand-in-hand, 
and  the  self-satisfied  satirizer  generally 
over-shoots  the  mark.  Garrick  was  ever 
ready  with  a  reply  to  his  assailants  ; 
when  Dr.  Hill  attacked  his  pronuncia- 
tion, saying  that  he  pronounced  his  "i's" 
as  if  they  were  ' '  u's, "  Garrick  answered — 

"  If  'tis  true,  as  you  say,  that  I've  injured  a  letter, 
I'll  change  my  note  soon,  and  I  hope  for  the  better. 
May  the  j  ust  right  of  letters  as  well  as  of  men, 
Hereafter  be  fixed  by  the  tongue  and  the  pen. 
Most  devoutly  I  wish  that  they  both  have  their  due, 
And  that  /  may  be  never  mistaken  for  i/." 

138 


FOUR     GREAT    ACTORS 

Comparing  Garrick  with  Betterton,  it 
must  be  remembered  that  he  was  more 
exposed  to  the  attacks  of  envy  from  the 
very  universality  of  his  success.  Never, 
perhaps,  was  there  a  man  in  any  profes- 
sion who  combined  so  many  various 
quahties.  A  fair  poet,  a  most  fluent  cor- 
respondent, an  admirable  conversation- 
alist, possessing  a  person  of  singular 
grace,  a  voice  of  marvellous  expressive- 
ness, and  a  disposition  so  mercurial  and 
vivacious  as  is  rarely  found  in  any  Eng- 
lishman, he  was  destined  to  be  a  great 
social  as  well  as  a  great  artistic  success. 
He  loved  the  society  of  men  of  birth  and 
fashion  ;  he  seems  to  have  had  a  more 
passionate  desire  to  please  in  private 
even  than  in  public,  and  almost  to  have 
justified  the  often  quoted  couplet  in  Gold- 
smith's "Retaliation." 

"  On  the  stage  he  was  natural,  simple,  affecting, 
'Twas  only  that  when  he  was  off  he  was  acting." 

Some  men,  envious  of  the  substantial 

139 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

fortune  which  he  realized  by  almost  in- 
cessant hard  work,  by  thorough  good 
principle  with  regard  to  money,  and  by  a 
noble,  not  a  paltry,  economy,  might  call 
him  mean  ;  though  many  of  them  knew 
well,  from  their  own  experience,  that  his 
nature  was  truly  generous — his  purse,  as 
well  as  his  heart,  ever  open  to  a  friend, 
however  little  he  might  deserve  it.  Yet 
they  sneered  at  his  want  of  reckless  ex- 
travagance, and  called  him  a  miser.  The 
greatest  offender  in  this  respect  was 
Samuel  Foote,  a  man  of  great  accom- 
plishments, witty,  but  always  ill-natured. 
It  is  difficult  to  speak  of  Foote's  conduct 
to  Garrick  in  any  moderate  language. 
Mr.  Forster  may  assert  that  behind 
Foote's  brutal  jests  there  always  lurked  a 
kindly  feeling ;  but  what  can  we  think  of 
the  man  who,  constantly  receiving  favors 
from  Garrick's  hand,  could  never  speak 
of  him  before  others  without  a  sneer  ; 
who  the  moment  he  had  received  the  loan 
140 


FOUR     GREAT     ACTORS 

of  money  or  other  favor  for  which  he  had 
cringed,  snarled — I  will  not  say  like  a 
dog,  for  no  dog  is  so  ungrateful — and 
snapped  at  the  hand  which  had  adminis- 
tered to  him  of  its  bounty.  When  this 
man,  who  had  never  spared  a  friend, 
whose  whole  life  had  been  passed  in 
maligning  others,  at  last  was  himself  a 
victim  of  a  vile  and  cruel  slander,  Gar- 
rick  forgot  the  gibes  and  sneers  of  which 
Foote  had  made  him  so  often  the  victim, 
and  stood  by  him  with  a  noble  devotion 
as  honorable  to  himself  as  it  was  ill- 
deserved  by  its  object.  Time  would  not 
suffice,  had  I  as  many  hours  as  I  have 
minutes  before  me,  to  tell  you  of  all  the 
acts  of  generosity  that  this  mean  man, 
this  niggardly  actor,  performed  in  his 
lifetime.  One  characteristic  anecdote 
will  suffice.  When  Whitfield  was  build- 
ing his  Tabernacle  in  Tottenham  Court 
Road,  he  employed  one  of  the  carpenters 
who  worked  for  Garrick  at  Drury  Lane. 

141 


FOUR     GREAT    ACTORS 

Subscriptions  for  the  Tabernacle  do  not 
seem  to  have  come  in  as  fast  as  they 
were  required  to  pay  the  workmen,  so 
that  the  carpenter  had  to  go  to  Garrick  to 
ask  for  an  advance.  When  pressed  for 
his  reason  he  confessed  that  he  had  not 
received  any  wages  from  Mr.  Whitfield. 
Garrick  made  the  advance  asked  for,  and 
soon  after  quietly  set  out  to  pay  a  visit 
to  Mr.  Whitfield,  when,  with  many 
apologies  for  the  liberty  he  was  taking, 
he  offered  him  a  five  hundred  pound 
bank  note  as  his  subscription  towards  the 
Tabernacle.  Considering  that  Garrick 
had  no  particular  sympathy  with  Non- 
conformists, this  action  speaks  as  much 
for  his  charity  as  a  Christian  as  it  does 
for  his  liberality  as  a  man. 

Perhaps  Richard  III.  remained  Gar- 
rick's  best  Shakesperean  character.  Of 
course  he  played  Gibber's  version  and 
not  Shakespeare's.  In  fact,  many  of  the 
Shakesperean  parts  were  not  played  from 
142 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

the  poet's  own  text,  but  Garrick  might 
have  doubted  whether  even  his  popularity 
would  have  reconciled  his  audiences 
to  the  unadulterated  poetry  of  our  great- 
est dramatist. 

Next  to  Richard,  Lear  would  seem  to 
have  been  his  best  Shakesperean  perform- 
ance. In  Hamlet  and  Othello  he  did 
not  equal  Betterton  ;  and  in  the  latter, 
certainly  from  all  one  can  discover,  he 
was  infinitely  surpassed  by  Edmund 
Kean.  In  fact  Othello  was  not  one  of  his 
great  parts.  But  in  the  wide  range  of 
characters  which  he  undertook,  Garrick 
was  probably  never  equalled.  A  poor 
actor  named  Everard,  who  was  first 
brought  out  as  a  boy  by  Garrick,  says  : 
"  Such  or  such  an  actor  in  their  respect- 
xwQ,  fortes  have  been  allowed  to  play  such 
or  such  a  part  equally  well  as  him  ;  but 
could  they  perform  Archer  and  Scrub  like 
him  ?  and  Abel  Drugger,  Ranger,  and 
Bayes,   and  Benedick  ;    speak  his   own 

143 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

prologue  to  Barbarossa,  in  the  character 
of  a  country-boy,  and  in  a  few  minutes 
transform  himself  in  the  same  play  to 
Selim  P  Nay,  in  the  same  night  he  has 
played  Sir  John  Brute  and  the  Guardian, 
Romeo  and  Lord  Chalkstone,  Hamlet  and 
Sharp,  King  Lear  and  Fribble,  King  Rich- 
ard and  the  Schoolboy  !  Could  anyone 
but  himself  attempt  such  a  wonderful 
variety,  such  an  amazing  contrast  of 
character,  and  be  equally  great  in  all  ? 
No,  no,  no  !     Garrick,  take  the  chair." 

Garrick  was,  without  doubt,  a  very  in- 
tense actor  ;  he  threw  himself  most  thor- 
oughly into  any  part  that  he  was  play- 
ing. Certainly  we  know  that  he  was  not 
wanting  in  reverence  for  Shakespeare  ;  in 
spite  of  the  liberties  which  he  ventured  to 
take  with  the  poet's  text,  he  loved  and 
worshipped  him.  To  Powell,  who  threat- 
ened to  be  at  one  time  a  formidable  rival, 
his  advice  was,  "Never  let  your  Shake- 
speare be  out  of  your  hands  ;  keep  him 
144 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

about  you  as  a  charm  ;  the  more  you  read 
him,  the  more  you  will  like  him,  and  the 
better  you  will  act."  As  to  his  yielding 
to  the  popular  taste  for  pantomime  and 
spectacle,  he  may  plead  a  justification  in 
the  words  which  his  friend  Johnson  put 
into  his  mouth  in  the  Prologue  that  he 
wrote  for  the  inauguration  of  his  manage- 
ment at  Drury  Lane  : — 

"  The  Drama's  laws  the  Drama's  patrons  give, 
And  we,  who  live  to  please,  must  please  to  live." 

We  must  remember  how  much  he  did 
for  the  stage.  Though  his  alterations  of 
Shakespeare  shock  us,  they  are  nothing 
to  those  outrages  committed  by  others, 
who  deformed  the  poet  beyond  recogni- 
tion. Garrick  made  Shakespeare's  plays 
once  more  popular.  He  purged  the  ac- 
tors, for  a  time  at  least,  of  faults  that  were 
fatal  to  any  high  class  of  drama,  and, 
above  all,  he  gradually  got  rid  of  those 
abominable  nuisances  (to  which  we  have 

145 


FOUR     GREAT    ACTORS 

already  alluded),  the  people  who  came 
and  took  their  seats  at  the  wings,  on  the 
stage  itself,  while  the  performance  was 
going  on,  hampering  the  efforts  of  the 
actors  and  actresses.  The  stage  would 
have  had  much  to  thank  Garrick  for  if  he 
had  done  nothing  more  than  this — if  only 
that  he  was  the  first  manager  who  kept 
the  audience  where  they  ought  to  be,  on 
the  other  side  of  the  footlights. 

In  his  private  life  Garrick  was  most 
happy.  He  was  fortunate  enough  to 
find  for  his  wife  a  simple-minded,  loyal 
woman,  in  a  quarter  which  some  people 
would  deem  very  unpromising.  Mrs. 
Garrick  was,  as  is  well-known,  a  cele- 
brated danseuse,  known  as  Mademoiselle 
Violette,  whose  real  name  was  Eva  Maria 
Weigel,  a  Viennese.  A  more  affectionate 
couple  were  never  seen  ;  they  were  not 
blessed  with  children,  but  they  lived  to- 
gether in  the  most  uninterrupted  happi- 
ness, and  their  house  was  the  scene  of 
146 


FOUR     GREAT    ACTORS 

many  social  gatherings  of  a  delightful 
kind.  Mrs.  Garrick  survived  her  cele- 
brated husband,  and  lived  to  the  ripe  age 
of  ninety-eight,  retaining  to  the  very  last 
much  of  that  grace  and  charm  of  expres- 
sion which  had  won  the  actor's  heart. 

Time  will  not  allow  me  to  dwell  on 
the  many  points  of  interest  in  Garrick's 
career ;  all  of  which  are  to  be  found  in 
Mr.  Percy  Fitzgerald's  Life  of  Garrick.  On 
returning  to  London  after  a  visit  to  the 
Spensers  at  Althorp  in  January,  1779,  he 
was  struck  down  by  a  fatal  attack  of  his 
old  malady,  the  gout,  and  died  at  the 
age  of  sixty-three. 

He  was  buried  in  Westminster  Abbey 
with  ceremonies  as  imposing  as  ever 
graced  the  funeral  of  a  great  man.  The 
pall-bearers  were  headed  by  the  Duke  of 
Devonshire  and  the  Earl  Spenser,  while 
round  the  grave  there  were  gathered  such 
men  as  Burke  and  Fox,  and  last,  not 
least,  his   old   friend  and   tutor,    Samuel 

147 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

Johnson,  his  rugged  countenance  stream- 
ing with  tears,  his  noble  heart  filled  with 
the  sincerest  grief.  The  words  so  often 
quoted,  artificial  though  they  may  seem, 
came  from  that  heart  when,  speaking  of 
his  dear  Davy's  death,  he  said  that  it  ' '  had 
eclipsed  the  gayety  of  nations. " 

Garrick's  remarkable  success  in  society, 
which  achieved  for  him  a  position  only 
inferior  to  that  he  achieved  on  the  stage, 
is  the  best  answer  to  what  is  often  talked 
about  the  degrading  nature  of  the  actor's 
profession.  Since  the  days  of  Roscius  no 
contempt  for  actors  in  general,  or  for  their 
art,  has  prevented  a  great  actor  from  at- 
taining that  position  which  is  accorded  to 
all  distinguished  in  what  are  held  to  be 
the  higher  arts. 

Nearly  nine  years  after  the  death  of 
Garrick,  on  November  4th,  1787,  a  young 
woman,  who  had  run  away  from  home 
when  little  more  than  a  child  to  join  a 
company  of  strolling  players,  and  who, 
148 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

when  that  occupation  failed,  earned  a 
scanty  hving  as  a  hawker  in  the  streets 
of  London,  gave  birth,  in  a  wretched 
room  near  Gray's  Inn,  to  an  illegitimate 
child.  This  woman  was  Nancy  Carey, 
the  grand-daughter  of  Henry  Carey,  the 
author  of  the  "National  Anthem."  She 
was  the  great-grand-daughter  of  George 
Saville,  Marquis  of  Halifax,  whose  nat- 
ural son  Henry  Carey  was.  A  compas- 
sionate actress,  Miss  Tidswell,  who 
knew  the  father  of  the  child,  Aaron 
Kean,  gave  her  what  assistance  she  could. 
Poor  Nance  was  removed  to  her  father's 
lodgings,  near  Gray's  Inn,  and  there, 
on  the  day  before  mentioned,  Edmund 
Kean  was  born. 

Three  months  after  his  birth  his  mother 
deserted  him,  leaving  him,  without  a  word 
of  apology  or  regret,  to  the  care  of  the 
woman  who  had  befriended  her  in  her 
trouble.  When  he  was  but  three  years 
old  he  was  brought,    amongst  a  number 

149 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

of  other  children,  to  Michael  Kelly  who 
was  then  bringing  out  the  opera  of  Cymon 
at  the  Opera  House  in  the  Haymarket, 
and,  thanks  to  his  personal  beauty,  he 
was  selected  for  the  part  of  Cupid.  Short- 
ly afterwards  he  found  his  way  to  Drury 
Lane,  where  the  handsome  baby — for  he 
was  little  more — figured  among  the  imps 
in  the  pantomime.  Taught  here  the 
tricks  of  the  acrobat,  he  had  at  four  years 
old  acquired  such  powers  of  contortion 
that  he  was  fit  to  rank  as  an  infant  phe- 
nomenon. But  the  usual  result  followed  : 
the  little  limbs  became  deformed,  and  had 
to  be  put  in  irons,  by  means  of  which 
they  regained  that  symmetry  with  which 
nature  had  at  first  endowed  them.  Three 
years  afterwards,  in  March,  1794,  John 
Kemble  was  acting  Macbeth  at  Drury 
Lane;  and,  in  the  "cauldron  scene,"  he 
engaged  some  children  to  personate  the 
supernatural  beings  summoned  by  the 
witches  from  that  weird  vessel.  Little 
150 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

Edmund  with  his  irons  was  the  cause  of 
a  ridiculous  accident,  and  the  attempt  to 
embody  the  ghostly  forms  was  abruptly 
abandoned.  But  the  child  seems  to  have 
been  pardoned  for  his  blunder,  and  for  a 
short  time  was  permitted  by  the  manager 
to  appear  in  one  or  two  children's  parts. 
Little  did  the  dignified  manager  imagine 
that  the  child — who  was  one  of  his  cauld- 
ron of  imps  in  Macbeth — was  to  be- 
come, twenty  years  later,  his  formidable 
rival — formidable  enough  to  oust  almost 
the  representative  of  the  Classical  school 
from  the  supremacy  he  had  hitherto  en- 
joyed on  the  Tragic  stage.  In  Orange 
Court,  Leicester  Square,  where  Holcroft, 
the  author  of  The  Road  to  Ruin,  was 
born,  Edmund  Kean  received  his  first 
education.  Scanty  enough  it  was,  for  it 
had  scarcely  begun  before  his  wretched 
mother  stepped  in  and  claimed  him  ; 
and;  after  her  re-appearance,  his  educa- 
tion seems  to  have  been   of  a  most  spas- 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

modic  character.  Hitherto,  the  child's 
experience  of  life  had  been  hard  enough. 
When  only  eight  years  of  age  he  ran 
away  to  Portsmouth,  and  shipped  him- 
self on  board  a  ship  bound  to  Madeira. 
But  he  found  his  new  life  harder  than  that 
from  which  he  had  escaped,  and,  by  dint 
of  feigning  deafness  and  lameness,  he 
succeeded  in  procuring  his  removal  to 
an  hospital  at  Madeira,  whence,  the  doc- 
tors finding  his  case  yielded  to  no  rem- 
edies, the  authorities  kindly  shipped  him 
again  to  England.  He  insisted  on  being 
deaf  and  lame  ;  indeed,  so  deaf  that  in  a 
violent  thunder-storm  he  remained  per- 
fectly unmoved,  explaining  his  compo- 
sure by  declaring  that  he  could  not  hear 
any  noise  at  all.  From  Portsmouth  he 
made  his  way  on  foot  to  London.  On 
presenting  himself  at  the  wretched  lodg- 
ings where  his  mother  lived,  he  found 
that  she  had  gone  away  with  Richard- 
son's troupe.  Penniless  and  half-starving, 
152 


FOUR     GREAT    ACTORS 

he  suddenly  thought  of  his  uncle,  Moses 
Kean,  who  lived  in  Lisle  Street,  Leicester 
Square,  a  queer  character,  who  gained 
a  precarious  living  by  giving  entertain- 
ments as  a  mimic  and  ventriloquist. 
The  uncle  received  his  nephew  warmly 
enough,  and  seems  to  have  cultivated, 
to  the  best  of  his  ability,  the  talent  for 
acting  which  he  recognized  at  once  in  the 
boy.  Edmund  again  enjoyed  a  kind  of 
desultory  education,  partly  carried  on  at 
school  and  partly  at  his  uncle's  home, 
where  he  enjoyed  the  advantage  of  the 
kind  instructions  of  his  old  friend.  Miss 
Tidswell,  of  D'Egville,  the  dancing  mas- 
ter, of  Angelo,  the  fencing  master,  and 
of  no  less  a  person  than  Incledon,  the 
celebrated  singer,  who  seems  to  have 
taken  the  greatest  interest  in  him.  But 
the  vagrant,  half-gypsy  disposition,  which 
he  inherited  from  his  mother,  could  never 
be  subdued,  and  he  was  constantly  dis- 
appearing   from  his   uncle's    house    for 

iS3 


FOUR     GREAT    ACTORS 

weeks  together,  which  he  would  pass  in 
going  about  from  one  roadside  inn  to  an- 
other, amusing  the  guests  with  his  acro- 
batic tricks,  and  his  monkey-like  imita- 
tions. In  vain  was  he  locked  up  in 
rooms,  the  height  of  which  from  the 
ground  was  such  as  seemed  to  render 
escape  impossible.  He  contrived  to  get 
out  somehow  or  other,  even  at  the  risk 
of  his  neck,  and  to  make  his  escape  to 
some  fair,  where  he  would  earn  a  few 
pence  by  the  exhibition  of  his  varied  ac- 
complishments. During  these  periods  of 
vagabondism  he  would  live  on  a  mere 
nothing,  sleeping  in  barns,  or  in  the 
open  air,  and  would  faithfully  bring  back 
his  gains  to  Uncle  Moses.  But  even  this 
astounding  generosity,  appealing,  as  it 
must  have  done,  to  the  uncle's  senti- 
ments, could  not  appease  him.  His 
uncle  went  so  far,  apparently  with  the 
concurrence  of  Miss  Tidswell,  as  to 
place  round  the  boy's  neck  a  brass  collar 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

with  the  inscription,  ' '  This  boy  belongs 
to  No.  9  Lisle  Street ;  please  bring  him 
home."  His  wandering  propensities  be- 
ing for  a  time  subdued,  we  find  the  little 
Edmund  again  engaged  at  Drury  Lane, 
and  delighting  the  actors  in  the  green- 
room by  giving  recitations  from  Richard 
III.,  probably  in  imitation  of  Cooke  ;  and, 
on  one  occasion,  among  his  audience 
was  Mrs.  Charles  Kemble.  During  this 
engagement  he  played  Arthur  to  Kem- 
ble's  King  John  and  Mrs.  Siddon's  Con- 
stance, and  appears  to  have  made  a  great 
success.  Soon  after  this,  his  uncle  Moses 
died  suddenly,  and  young  Kean  was  left 
to  the  severe  but  kindly  guardianship  of 
Miss  Tidswell.  We  cannot  follow  him 
through  all  the  vicissitudes  of  his  early 
career.  The  sketch  I  have  given  of  his 
early  life — ample  details  of  which  may  be 
found  in  Mrs.  Hawkins's  Life  of  Edmund 
Kean — will  give  you  a  sufficient  idea  of 
what  he  must  have  endured  and  suff"ered. 

155 


FOUR     GREAT    ACTORS 

When,  years  afterwards,  the  passionate 
love  of  Shakespeare,  which,  without  ex- 
aggeration, we  may  say  he  showed  almost 
from  his  cradle,  had  reaped  its  own  re- 
ward in  the  wonderful  success  which  he 
achieved,  if  we  find  him  then  averse  to 
respectable  conventionality,  erratic,  and 
even  dissipated  in  his  habits,  let  us  mer- 
cifully remember  the  bitter  and  degrad- 
ing suffering  which  he  passed  through  in 
his  childhood,  and  not  judge  too  harshly 
the  great  actor.  Unlike  those  whose 
lives  we  have  hitherto  considered,  he 
knew  none  of  the  softening  influences  of 
a  home  ;  to  him  the  very  name  of  mother, 
instead  of  recalling  every  tender  and 
affectionate  feeling,  was  but  the  symbol 
of  a  vague  horror,  the  fountain  of  that 
degradation  and  depravation  of  his  nat- 
ure, from  which  no  subsequent  prosper- 
ity could  ever  redeem  it. 

For    many   years  after    his    boyhood 
his  life  was  one  of  continual  hardship. 
156 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

With  that  unsubdued  conviction  of  his 
own  powers,  which  often  is  the  sole 
consolation  of  genius,  he  toiled  on  and 
bravely  struggled  through  the  sordid 
miseries  of  a  strolling  player's  life.  The 
road  to  success  lies  through  many  a 
thorny  course,  across  many  a  dreary 
stretch  of  desert  land,  over  many  an  ob- 
stacle, from  which  the  fainting  heart  is 
often  tempted  to  turn  back.  But  hope, 
and  the  sense  of  power  within,  which  no 
discouragements  can  subdue,  inspire  the 
struggling  artist  still  to  continue  the  con- 
flict, till  at  last  courage  and  perseverance 
meet  with  their  just  reward,  and  success 
comes.  The  only  feeling  then  to  which 
the  triumphant  artist  may  be  tempted  is 
one  of  good-natured  contempt  for  those 
who  are  so  ready  to  applaud  those  merits 
which,  in  the  past,  they  were  too  blind 
to  recognize.  Edmund  Kean  was  twenty- 
seven  years  old  before  his  day  of  triumph 
came. 

IS7 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

Without  any  preliminary  puffs,  without 
any  flourish  of  trumpets,  on  the  evening 
of  the  26th  January,  1814,  soaked  through 
with  the  rain,  Edmund  Kean  slunk  more 
than  walked  in  at  the  stage-door  of  Drury 
Lane  Theatre,  uncheered  by  one  word 
of  encouragement,  and  quite  unnoticed. 
He  found  his  way  to  the  wretched  dress- 
ing-room he  shared  in  common  with 
three  or  four  other  actors  ;  as  quick  as  pos- 
sible he  exchanged  his  dripping  clothes 
for  the  dress  of  Shylock  ;  and,  to  the 
horror  of  his  companions,  took  from 
his  bundle  a  hlack  wig — the  proof  of  his 
daring  rebellion  against  the  great  law  of 
conventionality,  which  had  always  con- 
demned Shylock  to  red  hair.  Cheered 
by  the  kindness  of  Bannister  and  Oxberry, 
the  latter  of  whom  offered  him  a  wel- 
come glass  of  brandy  and  water,  he  de- 
scended to  the  stage  dressed,  and  peeped 
through  the  curtain  to  see  a  more  than 
half-empty  house.     Dr.  Drury  was  wait- 


FOUR     GREAT    ACTORS 

ing  at  the  wings  to  give  him  a  hearty- 
welcome.  The  boxes  were  empty,  and 
there  were  about  five  hundred  people  in 
the  pit,  and  a  few  others  "thinly  scat- 
tered to  make  up  a  show. "  Shylock  was 
the  part  he  was  playing,  and  he  no  sooner 
stepped  upon  the  stage  than  the  inter- 
est of  the  audience  was  excited.  Noth- 
ing he  did  or  spoke  in  the  part  was 
done  or  spoken  in  a  conventional  man- 
ner. The  simple  words,  "I  will  be 
assured  I  may,"  were  given  with  such 
effect  that  the  audience  burst  into  ap- 
plause. When  the  act-drop  fell,  after  the 
speech  of  Shylock  to  Antonio,  his  success 
was  assured,  and  his  fellow-actors,  who 
had  avoided  him,  now  seemed  disposed 
to  congratulate  him  ;  but  he  shrank  from 
their  approaches.  The  great  scene  with 
Tubal  was  a  revelation  of  such  origin- 
ality and  of  such  terrible  force  as  had  not 
probably  been  seen  upon  those  boards 
before.     ' '  How  the  devil  so  few  of  them 

159 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

could  kick  up  such  a  row  was  something 
marvellous  !  "  naively  remarked  Oxberry. 
At  the  end  of  the  third  act  every  one 
was  ready  to  pay  court  to  him  ;  but 
again  he  held  aloof.  All  his  thoughts 
were  concentrated  on  the  great  "trial" 
scene,  which  was  coming.  In  that  scene 
the  wonderful  variety  of  his  acting  com- 
pleted his  triumph.  Trembling  with 
excitement,  he  resumed  his  half-dried 
clothes,  and,  glad  to  escape,  rushed  home. 
He  was  in  too  great  a  state  of  ecstasy  at 
first  to  speak,  but  his  face  told  his  wife 
that  he  had  realized  his  dream — that  he 
had  appeared  on  the  stage  of  Drury  Lane, 
and  that  his  great  powers  had  been 
instantly  acknowledged.  With  not  a 
shadow  of  doubt  as  to  his  future,  he  ex- 
claimed, "  Mary,  you  shall  ride  in  your 
carriage  ; "  and  taking  his  baby  boy  from 
the  cradle  and  kissing  him,  said,  "and 
Charley,  my  boy,  you  shall  go  to  Eton," 
— and  he  did. 
i6o 


FOUR     GREAT    ACTORS 

The  time  when  Edmund  Kean  made 
his  first  appearance  in  London  was  cer- 
tainly favorable  for  an  actor  of  genius. 
For  a  long  while  the  national  theatre  had 
been  in  a  bad  way  ;  and  nothing  but  fail- 
ure had  hitherto  met  the  efforts  of  the 
Committee  of  Management,  a  committee 
which  numbered  among  its  members 
Lord  Byron.  When  the  other  members 
of  the  committee,  with  a  strange  blindness 
to  their  own  interests,  proposed  that  for 
the  present,  Kean's  name  should  be  re- 
moved from  the  bills,  Byron  interested 
himself  on  his  behalf:  "You  have  a 
great  genius  among  you,"  he  said,  "  and 
you  do  not  know  it."  On  Kean's  sec- 
ond appearance  the  house  was  nearly 
doubled,  Hazlitt's  criticism  had  roused 
the  whole  body  of  critics,  and  they  were 
all  there  to  sit  in  judgment  upon  the  new- 
comer. His  utter  indifference  to  the 
audience  won  him  their  respect,  and  be- 
fore the  piece  was  half  over  the  sentence 

i6i 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

of  the  formidable  tribunal  was  in  his 
favor.  From  that  moment  Kean  exer- 
cised over  his  audiences  a  fascination 
which  was  probably  never  exercised  by 
any  other  actor.  Garrick  was  no  doubt 
his  superior  in  parts  of  high  comedy ;  he 
was  more  polished,  more  vivacious — his 
manner  more  distinguished,  and  his 
versatility  more  striking.  In  such  parts 
as  Coriolanus  or  RoUa,  John  Kemble  ex- 
celled him  :  but  in  Shylock,  in  Richard, 
in  lago,  and,  above  all,  in  Othello,  it  may 
be  doubted  whether  Edmund  Kean  ever 
had  an  equal.  As  far  as  one  can  judge — 
not  having  seen  Kean  one's-self — from 
the  many  criticisms  extant,  written  by 
the  most  intellectual  men,  and  from  the 
accounts  of  those  who  saw  him  in  his 
prime,  he  was,  to  my  mind — be  it  said 
without  any  disparagement  to  other  great 
actors — the  greatest  genius  that  our  stage 
has  ever  seen.  Unequal  he  may  have 
been,  perhaps  often  so,  but  there  were 
162 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

moments  in  his  acting  which  were,  with- 
out exagg-eration,  moments  of  inspiration. 
Coleridge  is  reported  to  have  said  that  to 
see  Kean  act  was  "like  reading  Shake- 
speare by  flashes  of  lightning."  This 
often-quoted  sentence  embodies  per- 
haps the  main  feature  of  Edmund  Kean's 
greatness  as  an  actor  ;  for,  when  he  was 
impersonating  the  heroes  of  our  poet,  he 
revealed  their  natures  by  an  instant  flash 
of  light  so  searching  that  every  minute 
feature,  which  by  the  ordinary  light  of 
day  was  hardly  visible,  stood  bright  and 
clear  before  you.  The  effect  of  such  act- 
ing was  indeed  that  of  lightning — it 
appalled ;  the  timid  hid  their  eyes,  and 
fashionable  society  shrank  from  such 
heart-piercing  revelations  of  human  pas- 
sion. Persons  who  had  schooled  them- 
selves to  control  their  emotion  till  they 
had  scarcely  any  emotion  left  to  control, 
were  repelled  rather  than  attracted  by 
Kean's    relentless   anatomy   of    all    the 

163 


FOUR     GREAT    ACTORS 

strongest  feeling  of  our  nature.  In  Sir 
Giles  Overreach,  a  character  almost  de- 
void of  poetry,  Kean's  acting  displayed 
with  such  powerful  and  relentless  truth 
the  depths  of  a  cruel,  avaricious  man, 
baffled  in  all  his  vilest  schemes,  that  the 
effect  he  produced  was  absolutely  awful. 
As  no  bird  but  the  eagle  can  look  without 
blinking  on  the  sun,  so  none  but  those 
who  in  the  sacred  privacy  of  their 
imaginations  had  stood  face  to  face 
with  the  mightiest  storms  of  human  pas- 
sion could  understand  such  a  perform- 
ance. Byron,  who  had  been  almost 
forced  into  a  quarrel  with  Kean  by  the 
actor's  disregard  of  the  ordinary  courte- 
sies of  society,  could  not  restrain  himself, 
but  rushed  behind  the  scenes  and  grasped 
the  hand  of  the  man  to  whom  he  felt  that 
he  owed  a  wonderful  revelation. 

I  might  discant  for  hours  with  an  en- 
thusiasm which,  perhaps,   only  an  actor 
could  feel   on  the  marvellous  details   of 
164 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

Kean's  impersonations.  He  was  not  a 
scholar  in  the  ordinary  sense  of  the  word, 
though  Heaven  knows  he  had  been 
schooled  by  adversity,  but  I  doubt  if  there 
ever  was  an  actor  who  so  thought  out  his 
part,  who  so  closely  studied  with  the  in- 
ward eye  of  the  artist  the  waves  of  emotion 
that  might  have  agitated  the  minds  of  the 
beings  whom  he  represented.  One  hears 
of  him  during  those  early  years  of  strug- 
gle and  privation,  pacing  silently  along 
the  road,  foot-sore  and  half-starved,  but 
unconscious  of  his  own  sufferings,  be- 
cause he  was  immersed  in  the  study  of 
those  great  creations  of  Shakespeare's 
genius  which  he  was  destined  to  endow 
with  life  upon  the  stage.  When  you 
read  of  Edmund  Kean  as,  alas  !  he  was 
later  on  in  life,  with  mental  and  physical 
powers  impaired,  think  of  the  description 
those  gave  of  him  who  knew  him  best  in 
his  earlier  years ;  how  amidst  all  the 
wildness  and  half-savage  Bohemianism, 

x6s 


FOUR    GREAT    ACTORS 

which  the  miseries  of  his  Hfe  had  en- 
sured, he  displayed,  time  after  time,  the 
most  large-hearted  generosity,  the  ten- 
derest  kindness  of  which  human  nature 
is  capable.  Think  of  him  working  with 
a  concentrated  energy  for  the  one  object 
which  he  sought,  namely,  to  reach  the 
highest  distinction  in  his  calling.  Think 
of  him  as  sparing  no  mental  or  physical 
labor  to  attain  this  end,  an  end  which 
seemed  ever  fading  further  and  further 
from  his  grasp.  Think  of  the  disappoint- 
ments, the  cruel  mockeries  of  hope 
which,  day  after  day,  he  had  to  encoun- 
ter; and  then  be  harsh  if  you  can  to 
those  moral  failings  for  which  his  mis- 
fortunes rather  than  his  faults  were 
responsible.  If  you  are  inclined  to  be 
severe,  you  may  console  yourselves  with 
the  reflection  that  this  genius,  who  had 
given  -the  highest  intellectual  pleasure 
to  hundreds  and  thousands  of  human 
beings,  was  hounded  by  hypocritical 
i66 


FOUR     GREAT    ACTORS 

sanctimoniousness  out  of  his  native 
land  ;  and  though,  two  years  afterwards, 
one  is  glad  to  say,  for  the  honor  of 
one's  country,  a  complete  reaction  took 
place,  and  his  reappearance  was  greeted 
with  every  mark  of  hearty  welcome,  the 
blow  had  been  struck  from  which  neither 
his  mind  or  his  body  ever  recovered. 
He  lingered  upon  the  stage,  and  died  at 
the  age  of  forty-six,  after  five  years  of 
suffering — almost  a  beggar — with  only 
a  solitary  ten-pound  note  remaining  of 
the  large  fortune  his  genius  had  realized. 
It  is  said  that  Kean  swept  away  the 
Kembles  and  their  Classical  school  of 
acting.  He  did  not  do  that.  The  mem- 
ory of  Sarah  Siddons,  tragic  queen  of  the 
British  stage,  was  never  to  be  effaced, 
and  I  would  remind  you  that  when  Kean 
was  a  country  actor  (assured  of  his  own 
powers,  however  unappreciated),  resent- 
ing with  passionate  pride  the  idea  of 
playing  second  to  "the  Infant  Roscius," 

167 


FOUR     GREAT    ACTORS 

who  was  for  a  time  the  craze  and  idol  of 
the  hour,  "Never,"  said  he,  "never; 
I  will  play  second  to  no  one  but  John 
Kemble  ! "  I  am  certain  that  when  his 
better  nature  had  the  ascendency  no  one 
would  have  more  generously  acknowl- 
edged the  merits  of  Kemble  than  Ed- 
mund Kean.  It  is  idle  to  say  that  be- 
cause his  style  was  solemn  and  slow, 
Kemble  was  not  one  of  the  greatest 
actors  that  our  stage  has  produced.  It 
is  only  those  whose  natures  make  them 
incapable  of  approbation  or  condemna- 
tion in  artistic  matters  without  being 
partisans,  who,  because  they  admire 
Edmund  Kean,  would  admit  no  merit  in 
John  Kemble.  The  world  of  art,  thank 
Heaven,  is  wide  enough  for  both,  and 
the  hearts  of  those  who  truly  love  art  are 
large  enough  to  cherish  the  memory  of 
both  as  of  men  who  did  noble  work 
in  the  profession  which  they  adorned. 
Kean  blended  the  Realistic  with  the 
1 68 


FOUR     GREAT    ACTORS 

Ideal  in  acting,  and  founded  a  school  of 
which  William  Charles  Macready  was, 
afterwards,  in  England,  the  foremost 
disciple. 

Thus  have  we  glanced,  briefly  enough, 
at   four   of  our  greatest    actors    whose 
names  are  landmarks  in  the  history  of 
the   Drama    in    England,    the    greatest 
Drama   of  the   world.      We    have   seen 
how   they   all   carried   out,  by   different 
methods  perhaps,  but  in  the  same  spirit, 
the  principle  that  in  acting  Nature  must 
dominate  Art.      But  it  is  Art  that  must 
interpret    Nature ;    and  to  interpret   the 
thoughts  and  emotions   of  her  mistress 
should  be   her  first  object.      But   those 
thoughts,    those   emotions,   must  be 
interpreted  with  grace,  with  dig- 
nity and  with  temperance  ; 
and    these,    let    us   re- 
member, Art  alone 
can  teach. 

169 


ADDRESS 

SESSIONAL     OPENING 

PHILOSOPHICAL  INSTITUTION 

EDINBURGH 

9    NOVEMBER 
189I 


THE    ART    OF    ACTING 


HAVE  chosen  as  the  subject 
of  the  address  with  which  I 
have  the  honor  to  inaugur- 
ate for  the  second  time  the 
Session  of  the  Edinburgh 
Philosophical  Institution, 
"The  Art  of  Acting."  I 
have  done  so,  in  the  first  instance,  be- 
cause I  take  it  for  granted  that  when  you 
bestow  on  any  man  the  honor  of  asking 
him  to  deliver  the  inaugural  address,  it 
is  your  wish  to  hear  him  speak  of  the 
subject  with  which  he  is  best  acquainted  ; 
and  the  Art  of  Acting  is  the  subject  to 
which  my  life  has  been  devoted.  I  have 
another  reason  also  which,  though  it 
may,  so   far  as   you   are  concerned,  be 

173 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

personal  to  those  of  my  calling,  I  think 
it  well  to  put  before  you.  It  is  that  there 
may  be,  from  the  point  of  view  of  an 
actor  distinguished  by  your  favor,  some 
sort  of  official  utterance  on  the  subject. 
There  are  some  irresponsible  writers  who 
have  of  late  tried  to  excite  controversy 
by  assertions,  generally  false  and  always 
misleading,  as  to  the  stage  and  those 
devoted  to  the  arts  connected  with  it. 
Some  of  these  writers  go  so  far  as  to 
assert  that  Acting  is  not  an  Art  at  all ; 
and  though  we  must  not  take  such  wild 
assertions  quite  seriously,  I  think  it  well 
to  place  on  record  at  least  a  polite  de- 
nial of  their  accuracy.  It  would  not,  of 
course,  be  seemly  to  merely  take  so 
grave  an  occasion  as  the  present  as  an 
opportunity  for  such  a  controversy,  but 
as  I  am  dealing  with  the  subject  before 
you,  I  think  it  better  to  place  you  in 
full  knowledge  of  the  circumstances.  It 
does  not  do,  of  course,  to  pay  too  much 
174 


THE     ART      OF     ACTING 

attention  to  ephemeral  writings,  any 
more  than  to  creatures  of  the  mist  and 
the  swamp  and  the  night.  But  even  the 
buzzing  of  the  midge,  though  the  insect 
may  be  harmless  compared  with  its  more 
poison-laden  fellows,  can  divert  the  mind 
from  more  important  things.  To  dis- 
regard entirely  the  world  of  ephemera, 
and  their  several  actions  and  effects  were 
to  deny  the  entirety  of  the  scheme  of 
creation. 

I  take  it  for  granted  that  in  addressing 
you  on  the  subject  of  the  Art  of  Acting  I 
am  not,  prima  facie,  encountering  set 
prejudices  ;  for  had  you  despised  the  Art 
which  I  represent  I  should  not  have  had 
the  honor  of  appearing  before  you  to-day. 
You  will,  I  trust,  on  your  part,  bear  this 
in  mind,  and  I  shall,  on  my  part,  never 
forget  that  you  are  members  of  a  Philo- 
sophical Institution,  the  very  root  and 
basis  of  whose  work  is  to  inquire  into  the 
heart  of  things  with  the  purpose. of  dis- 

^75 


THE     ART      OF     ACTING 

covering  why  such  as  come  under  your 
notice  are  thus  or  thus. 

The  subject  of  my  address  is  a  very 
vast  one,  and  is,  I  assure  you,  worthy  of 
a  careful  study.  Writers  such  as  Vol- 
taire, Schlegel,  Goethe,  Lessing,  Charles 
Lamb,  Hazlitt,  and  Schiller,  have  not  dis- 
dained to  treat  it  with  that  seriousness 
which  Art  specially  demands — which 
anything  in  life  requires  whose  purpose 
is  not  immediate  and  imperative.  For 
my  own  part  I  can  only  bring  you  the 
experience  of  more  than  thirty  years  of 
hard  and  earnest  work.  Out  of  wide 
experience  let  me  point  out  that  there 
are  many  degrees  of  merit,  both  of  aim, 
of  endeavor,  and  of  execution  in  acting, 
as  in  all  things.  I  want  you  to  think  of 
acting  at  its  best — as  it  may  be,  as  it  can 
be,  as  it  has  been,  and  is — and  as  it  shall 
be,  whilst  it  be  followed  by  men  and 
women  of  strong  and  earnest  purpose. 
I  do  not  for  a  moment  wish  you  to  be- 
176 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

lieve  that  only  Shakespeare  and  the  great 
writers  are  worthy  of  being  played,  and 
that  all  those  efforts  that  in  centuries 
have  gathered  themselves  round  great 
names  are  worthy  of  your  praise.  In 
the  House  of  Art  are  many  mansions 
where  men  may  strive  worthily  and  live 
cleanly  lives.  All  Art  is  worthy,  and 
can  be  seriously  considered,  so  long  as 
the  intention  be  good  and  the  efforts  to 
achieve  success  be  conducted  with  seem- 
liness.  And  let  me  here  say,  that  of  all 
the  arts  none  requires  greater  intention 
than  the  art  of  acting.  Throughout  it  is 
necessary  to  do  something,  and  that 
something  cannot  fittingly  be  left  to 
chance,  or  the  unknown  inspiration  of 
a  moment.  I  say  "  unknown,"  for  if 
known,  then  the  intention  is  to  repro- 
duce, and  the  success  of  the  effort  can  be 
in  nowise  due  to  chance.  It  may  be, 
of  course,  that  in  moments  of  passionate 
excitement  the  mind  grasps  some  new 

177 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

idea,  or  the  nervous  tension  suggests  to 
the  mechanical  parts  of  the  body  some 
new  form  of  expression  ;  but  such  are 
accidents  which  belong  to  the  great 
scheme  of  life,  and  not  to  this  art,  or  any- 
art,  alone.  You  all  know  the  story  of 
the  painter  who,  in  despair  at  not  being 
able  to  carry  out  the  intention  of  his 
imagination,  dashed  his  brush  at  the  im- 
perfect canvas,  and  with  the  scattering 
paint  produced  by  chance  the  very  effect 
which  his  brush  guided  by  his  skill  alone, 
had  failed  to  achieve.  The  actor's  busi- 
ness is  primarily  to  reproduce  the  ideas 
of  the  author's  brain,  to  give  them  form, 
and  substance,  and  color,  and  life,  so 
that  those  who  behold  the  action  of  a 
play  may,  so  far  as  can  be  effected,  be 
lured  into  the  fleeting  belief  that  they 
behold  reality.  Macready,  who  was  an 
earnest  student,  defined  the  art  of  the 
actor  "to  fathom  the  depths  of  charac- 
ter, to  trace  its  latent  motives,  to  feel  its 
178 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

finest  quivering  of  emotion,  is  to  compre- 
hend the  thoughts  that  are  hidden  under 
words,  and  thus  possess  one's-self  of  the 
actual  mind  of  the  individual  man  "  ; 
and  Talma  spoke  of  it  as  "the  union  of 
grandeur  without  pomp,  and  nature 
without  triviality  "  ;  whilst  Shakespeare 
wrote,  "the  purpose  of  playing,  whose 
end,  both  at  the  first  and  now,  was  and 
is,  to  hold,  as  'twere,  the  mirror  up  to 
nature  ;  to  show  virtue  her  own  feature, 
scorn  her  own  image,  and  the  very  age 
and  body  of  the  time  his  form  and  pres- 
sure. " 

This  effort  to  reproduce  man  in  his 
moods  is  no  mere  trick  of  fancy  carried 
into  execution.  It  is  a  part  of  the  char- 
acter of  a  strong  nation,  and  has  a 
wider  bearing  on  national  life  than  per- 
haps unthinking  people  are  aware.  Mr. 
Froude,  in  his  survey  of  early  England, 
gives  it  a  special  place  ;  and  I  venture  to 
quote  his  words,  for  they  carry  with  them, 

179 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

not  only  their  own  lesson,  but  the  au- 
thority of  a  great  name  in  historical 
research. 

"No  genius  can  dispense  with  expe- 
rience; the  aberrations  of  power,  un- 
guided  or  ill-guided,  are  ever  in  propor- 
tion to  its  intensity,  and  life  is  not  long 
enough  to  recover  from  inevitable  mis- 
takes. Noble  conceptions  already  exist- 
ing, and  a  noble  school  of  execution 
which  will  launch  mind  and  hand  at 
once  upon  their  true  courses,  are  indis- 
pensable to  transcendent  excellence;  and 
Shakespeare's  plays  were  as  much  the 
offspring  of  the  long  generations  who 
had  pioneered  his  road  for  him,  as  the 
discoveries  of  Newton  were  the  offspring 
of  those  of  Copernicus. 

"No  great  general  ever  arose  out  of  a 
nation  of  cowards  ;  no  great  statesman 
or  philosopher  out  of  a  nation  of  fools  ; 
no  great  artist  out  of  a  nation  of  material- 
ists ;  no  great  drama,  except  when  the 
i8o 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

drama  was  the  possession  of  the  people. 
Acting  was  the  especial  amusement  of 
the  English,  from  the  palace  to  the  vil- 
lage green.  It  was  the  result  and  expres- 
sion of  their  strong,  tranquil  possession 
of  their  lives,  of  their  thorough  power 
over  themselves,  and  power  over  cir- 
cumstances. They  were  troubled  with 
no  subjective  speculations ;  no  social 
problems  vexed  them  with  which  they 
were  unable  to  deal ;  and  in  the  exuber- 
ance of  vigor  and  spirit,  they  were  able, 
in  the  strict  and  literal  sense  of  the  word, 
to  play  with  the  materials  of  life."  So 
says  Mr.  Froude. 

In  the  face  of  this  statement  of  fact  set 
forth  gravely  in  its  place  in  the  history 
of  our  land,  what  becomes  of  such  bold 
assertions  as  are  sometimes  made  regard- 
ing the  place  of  the  drama  being  but  a 
poor  one,  since  the  efforts  of  the  actor 
are  but  mimetic  and  ephemeral,  that  they 
pass  away  as  a  tale  that   is  told  ?      All 

i8i 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

art  is  mimetic ;  and  even  life  itself,  the 
highest  and  last  gift  of  God  to  His  people, 
is  fleeting.  Marble  crumbles,  and  the 
very  names  of  great  cities  become  buried 
in  the  dust  of  ages.  Who  then  would 
dare  to  arrogate  to  any  art  an  unchang- 
ing place  in  the  scheme  of  the  world's 
development,  or  would  condemn  it  be- 
cause its  efforts  fade  and  pass.?  Nay, 
more ;  has  even  the  tale  that  is  told  no 
significance  in  after  years  ?  Can  such  not 
stir,  when  it  is  worth  the  telling,  the 
hearts  of  men,  to  whom  it  comes  as  an 
echo  from  the  past  ?  Have  not  those 
tales  remained  most  vital  and  most  wide- 
ly known  which  are  told  and  told  again 
and  again,  face  to  face  and  heart  to 
heart,  when  the  teller  and  the  listener  are 
adding,  down  the  ages,  strength  to  the 
current  of  a  mighty  thought  or  a  mighty 
deed  and  its  record  ? 

Surely   the    record   that    lives   in    the 
minds  of  men  is  still  a  record,  though  it 
182 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

be  not  graven  on  brass  or  wrought  in 
marble.  And  it  were  a  poor  conception 
of  the  value  of  any  art,  if,  in  considering 
it,  we  were  to  keep  our  eyes  fixed  on 
some  dark  spot,  some  imperfection,  and 
shut  our  eyes  to  its  aim,  its  power,  its 
beauty.  It  were  a  poor  age  indeed  where 
such  a  state  of  things  is  possible ;  as  poor 
as  that  of  which  Mrs.  Browning's  un- 
happy poet  spoke  in  the  bitterness  of  his 
soul  : 

"  The  age  culls  simples, 
With  a  broad  clown's  back  turned  broadly  to  the 
glory  of  the  stars." 

Let  us  lift  our  faces  when  we  wish  to 
judge  truly  of  any  earnest  work  of  the 
hand  or  mind  of  man,  and  see  it  placed 
in  the  widest  horizon  that  is  given  to  us. 
Poetry,  painting,  sculpture,  music,  archi- 
tecture, all  have  a  bearing  on  their  time, 
and  beyond  it ;  and  the  actor,  though  his 
knowledge  may  be,  and  must  be,  limited 
by  the  knowledge  of  his  age,  so  long  as 

183 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

he  sound  the  notes  of  human  passion,  has 
something  which  is  common  to  all  the 
ages.  If  he  can  smite  water  from  the 
rock  of  one  hardened  human  heart — if  he 
can  bring  light  to  the  eye  or  wholesome 
color  to  the  faded  cheek — if  he  can  bring 
or  restore  in  ever  so  slight  degree  the 
sunshine  of  hope,  of  pleasure,  of  gayety, 
surely  he  cannot  have  worked  in  vain. 
It  would  need  but  a  small  effort  of  imag- 
ination to  believe  that  that  great  wave 
theory,  which  the  scientists  have  proved 
as  ruling  the  manifestations  of  light  and 
sound,  applies  also  to  the  efforts  of  human 
emotion.  And  who  shall  tell  us  the  ulti- 
mate bounds  of  these  waves  of  light  and 
sound?  If  these  discernible  waves  can 
be  traced  till  they  fade  into  impalpable 
nothingness,  may  we  not  think  that  this 
other,  impalpable  at  the  beginning  as 
they  are  at  the  end,  can  alone  stretch 
into  the  dimness  of  memory  ?  Sir 
Joshua's  gallant  compliment,  that  he 
184 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

achieved  immortality  by  writing  his  name 
on  the  hem  of  Mrs.  Siddons's  garment, 
when  he  painted  her  as  the  Tragic  Muse, 
had  a  deeper  significance  than  its  pretty 
fancy  would  at  first  imply. 

Not  for  a  moment  is  the  position  to  be 
accepted  that  the  theatre  is  merely  a 
place  of  amusement.  That  it  is  primarily 
a  place  of  amusement,  and  is  regarded 
as  such  by  its  habilues,  is  of  course  ap- 
parent; but  this  is  not  its  limitation. 
For  authors,  managers,  and  actors  it  is 
a  serious  employment,  to  be  undertaken 
gravely,  and  of  necessity  to  be  adhered 
to  rigidly.  Thus  far  it  may  be  considered 
from  these  different  stand-points ;  but 
there  is  a  larger  view — that  of  the  State. 
Here  we  have  to  consider  a  custom 
of  natural  growth  specially  suitable  to 
the  genius  of  the  nation.  It  has  ad- 
vanced with  the  progress  of  each  age,  and 
multiplied  with  its  material  prosperity. 
It  is  a  living  power,  to  be  used  for  good, 

i8S 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

or  possibly  for  evil  ;  and  far-seeing  men 
recognize  in  it,  based  though  it  be  on  the 
relaxation  and  pleasures  of  the  people, 
an  educational  medium  of  no  mean  order. 
Its  progress  in  the  past  century  has  been 
the  means  of  teaching  to  millions  of  peo- 
ple a  great  number  of  facts  which  had 
perhaps  otherwise  been  lost  to  them. 
How  many  are  there  who  have  had 
brought  home  to  them  in  an  understand- 
able manner  by  stage-plays  the  costumes, 
habits,  manners,  and  customs  of  countries 
and  ages  other  than  their  own  ;  what 
insight  have  they  thus  obtained  into  facts 
and  vicissitudes  of  life — of  passions  and 
sorrows  and  ambitions  outside  the  nar- 
row scope  of  their  own  lives,  and  which 
yet  may  and  do  mould  the  destinies  of 
men.  All  this  is  education — education 
in  its  widest  sense,  for  it  broadens  the 
sympathies  and  enlarges  the  intellectual 
grasp.  And  beyond  this  again — for  these 
are  advantages  on  the  material  side — 
i86 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

there  is  that  higher  education  of  the  heart, 
which  raises  in  the  scale  of  creation  all 
who  are  subject  to  its  sweetening  in' 
fluences.  To  hold  his  place  therefore 
amongst  these  progressing  forces,  the 
actor  must  at  the  start  be  well  endowed 
with  some  special  powers,  and  by  train- 
ing, reading,  and  culture  of  many  kinds, 
be  equipped  for  the  work  before  him. 
No  amount  of  training  can  give  to  a  dense 
understanding  and  a  clumsy  personality 
certain  powers  of  quickness  and  spon- 
taneity ;  and,  on  the  other  hand,  no 
genius  can  find  its  fullest  expression  with- 
out some  understanding  of  the  principles 
and  method  of  a  craft.  It  is  the  actor's 
part  to  represent  or  interpret  the  ideas 
and  emotions  which  the  poet  has  created, 
and  to  do  this  he  must  at  the  first  have  a  full 
knowledge  and  understanding  of  them. 
This  is  in  itself  no  easy  task.  It  requires 
much  study  and  much  labor  of  many 
kinds.      Having  then  acquired  an  idea, 

187 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

his  intention  to  work  it  out  into  reality- 
must  be  put  in  force  ;  and  here  new  diffi- 
culties crop  up  at  every  further  step  taken 
in  advance.  Now  and  again  it  suffices 
the  poet  to  think  and  write  in  abstrac- 
tions ;  but  the  actor's  work  is  absolutely 
concrete.  He  is  brought  in  every  phase 
of  his  work  into  direct  comparison  with 
existing  things,  and  must  be  judged  by 
the  most  exacting  standards  of  criticism. 
Not  only  must  his  dress  be  suitable  to  the 
part  which  he  assumes,  but  his  bearing 
must  not  be  in  any  way  antagonistic  to 
the  spirit  of  the  time  in  which  the  play  is 
fixed.  The  free  bearing  of  the  sixteenth 
century  is  distinct  from  the  artificial  one 
of  the  seventeenth,  the  mannered  one  of 
the  eighteenth,  and  the  careless  one  of 
the  nineteenth.  And  all  this  quite  ex- 
clusive of  the  minute  qualities  and  indi- 
vidualities of  the  character  represented. 
The  voice  must  be  modulated  to  the 
vogue  of  the  time.  The  habitual  action 
i88 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

of  a  rapier-bearing  age  is  different  to  that 
of  a  mail-clad  one — nay,  the  armor  of 
a  period  ruled  in  real  life  the  poise  and 
bearing  of  the  body  ;  and  all  this  must 
be  reproduced  on  the  stage,  unless  the 
intelligence  of  the  audience,  be  they  ever 
so  little  skilled  in  history,  is  to  count  as 
naught. 

It  cannot  therefore  be  seriously  put  for- 
ward in  the  face  of  such  manifold  require- 
ments that  no  Art  is  required  for  the 
representation  of  suitable  action.  Are  we 
to  imagine  that  inspiration  or  emotion  of 
any  kind  is  to  supply  the  place  of  direct 
knowledge  of  facts — of  skill  in  the  very 
grammar  of  craftsmanship  ?  Where  a 
great  result  is  arrived  at  much  effort  is 
required,  whether  the  same  be  immediate 
or  has  been  spread  over  a  time  of  previous 
preparation.  In  this  nineteenth  century 
the  spirit  of  education  stalks  abroad  and 
influences  men  directly  and  indirectly, 
by  private  generosity  and  national  fore- 

189 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

sight,  to  accumulate  as  religiously  as  in 
former  ages  ecclesiastics  and  devotees 
gathered  sacred  relics,  all  that  helps  to 
give  the  people  a  full  understanding  of 
lives  and  times  and  countries  other  than 
their  own.  Can  it  be  that  in  such  an  age 
all  that  can  help  to  aid  the  inspiration 
and  to  increase  direct  knowledge  is  of  no 
account  whatever,  because,  forsooth,  it 
has  a  medium  or  method  of  its  own  ? 
There  are  those  who  say  that  Shakespeare 
is  better  in  the  closet  than  on  the  stage  ; 
that  dramatic  beauty  is  more  convincing 
when  read  in  private  than  when  spoken 
on  the  stage  to  the  accompaniment  of 
suitable  action.  And  yet,  if  this  be  so, 
it  is  a  strange  thing  that,  with  all  the 
activity  of  the  new-born  printing-press, 
Shakespeare's  works  were  not  knoM'^n  to 
the  reading  public  till  the  fame  of  the 
writer  had  been  made  on  the  stage.  And 
it  is  a  stranger  thing  still,  if  the  drama  be 
a  mere  poetic  form  of  words,  that  the 
190 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

writer  who  began  with  Venus  and  Adonis, 
when  he  found  the  true  riiethod  of  ex- 
pression to  suit  his  genius,  ended  with 
Hamlet  and  TJie  Tempest. 

How  is  it,  I  ask,  if  these  responsible 
makers  of  statements  be  correct,  that 
every  great  writer  down  from  the  days  of 
Elizabeth,  when  the  drama  took  practical 
shape  from  the  wish  of  the  poets  to 
render  human  life  in  all  its  phases,  have 
been  desirous  of  seeing  their  works,  when 
written  in  dramatic  form,  represented  on 
the  stage — and  not  only  represented,  but 
represented  under  the  most  favorable  con- 
ditions obtainable,  both  as  to  the  fitness 
of  setting  and  the  choice  of  the  most 
skilled  and  excellent  players  ?  Are  we  to 
take  it  that  the  poet,  with  his  eye  in  a 
fine  phrenzy  rolling,  sees  all  the  minute 
details  of  form,  color,  light,  sound,  and 
action  which  have  to  be  rendered  com- 
plete on  the  stage  ?  Is  there  nothing  in 
what  the  individual  actor,  who  is  gifted 

191 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

with  fine  sense  and  emotional  power,  can 
add  to  mere  words,  however  grand  and 
rolling  in  themselves,  and  whatsoever 
mighty  image  they  may  convey  ?  Can 
it  be  possible  that  there  is  any  sane  per- 
son who  holds  that  there  is  no  such  thing 
as  expression  in  music  so  long  as  the 
written  notes  are  correctly  rendered — 
that  the  musical  expression  of  a  Paganini 
or  a  Liszt,  or  that  the  voice  of  a  Mali- 
bran  or  a  Grisi,  has  no  special  charm — 
nay  more,  that  there  is  not  some  special 
excellence  in  the  instruments  of  Amati  or 
Stradivarius  ?  If  there  be,  we  can  leave 
to  him,  whilst  the  rest  of  mankind  marvel 
at  his  self-sufficient  obtuseness,  to  hold 
that  it  was  nothing  but  his  own  imagina- 
tion which  so  much  influenced  Hazlitt 
when  he  was  touched  to  the  heart  by 
Edmund  Kean's  rendering  of  the  words  of 
the  remorseful  Moor,  "Fool,  fool,  fool  !  " 
Why,  the  action  of  a  player  who  knows 
how  to  convey  to  the  audience  that  he  is 
X92 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

listening  to  another  speaking,  can  not 
only  help  in  the  illusion  of  the  general 
effect,  but  he  himself  can  suggest  a  run- 
ning commentary  on  what  is  spoken.  In 
every  moment  in  which  he  is  on  the 
stage,  an  actor  accomplished  in  his  craft 
can  convey  ideas  to  the  mind. 

It  is  in  the  representation  of  passion 
that  the  intention  of  the  actor  appears  in 
its  greatest  force.  He  wishes  to  do  a  par- 
ticular thing,  and  so  far  the  wish  is  father 
to  the  thought  that  the  brain  begins  to 
work  in  the  required  direction,  and  the 
emotional  faculties  and  the  whole  nerv- 
ous and  muscular  systems  follow  suit.  A 
skilled  actor  can  count  on  this  develop- 
ment of  power,  if  it  be  given  to  him  to 
rise  at  all  to  the  height  of  a  passion  ;  and 
the  inspiration  of  such  moments  may, 
now  and  again,  reveal  to  him  some  new 
force  or  beauty  in  the  character  which 
he  represents.  Thus  he  will  gather  in 
time  a  certain  habitual  strength  in  a  par- 

193 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

ticular  representation  of  passion.  Diderot 
laid  down  a  theory  that  an  actor  never 
feels  the  part  he  is  acting.  It  is  of  course 
true  that  the  pain  he  suffers  is  not  real 
pain,  but  I  leave  it  to  any  one  who  has 
ever  felt  his  own  heart  touched  by  the 
woes  of  another  to  say  if  he  can  even 
imagine  a  case  where  the  man  who  fol- 
lows in  minutest  detail  the  history  of  an 
emotion,  from  its  inception  onward,  is  the 
only  one  who  cannot  be  stirred  by  it — 
more  especially  when  his  own  individu- 
ality must  perforce  be  merged  in  that 
of  the  archetypal  sufferer.  Talma  knew 
that  it  was  possible  for  an  actor  to  feel 
to  the  full  a  simulated  passion,  and  yet 
whilst  being  swept  by  it  to  retain  his  con- 
sciousness of  his  surroundings  and  his 
purpose.  In  his  own  words — "The  in- 
telligence accumulates  and  preserves  all 
the  creations  of  sensibility."  And  this  is 
what  Shakespeare  means  when  he  makes 
Hamlet  tell  the  players — "for  in  the 
194 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

very  torrent,  tempest,  and,  as  I  may  say, 
whirlwind  of  your  passion,  you  must 
beget  a  temperance  that  may  give  it 
smoothness. " 

How  can  any  one  be  temperate  in  the 
midst  of  his  passion,  lest  it  be  that  his 
consciousness  and  his  purpose  remain  to 
him  ?  Let  me  say  that  it  is  this  very  dis- 
cretion which  marks  the  ultimate  boun- 
dary of  an  Art,  which  stands  within  the 
line  of  demarcation  between  Art  and  Na- 
ture. In  Nature  there  is  no  such  discre- 
tion. Passion  rules  supreme  and  alone  ; 
discretion  ceases,  and  certain  conse- 
quences cease  to  be  any  deterrent  or  to 
convey  any  warning.  It  must  never  be 
forgotten  that  all  Art  has  the  aim  or  ob- 
ject of  seeming  and  not  of  being ;  and 
that  to  understate  is  as  bad  as  to  over- 
state the  modesty  or  the  efflorescence  of 
Nature.  It  is  not  possible  to  show  with- 
in the  scope  of  any  Art  the  entire  com- 
plexity and  the  myriad  combining  influ- 

195 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

ences  of  Nature.  The  artist  has  to  accept 
the  conventional  standard — the  accepted 
significance — of  nmany  things,  and  confine 
himself  to  the  exposition  of  that  which  is 
his  immediate  purpose.  To  produce  the 
effect  of  reality  it  is  necessary,  therefore, 
that  the  efforts  of  an  artist  should  be 
slightly  different  from  the  actions  of  real 
life.  The  perspective  of  the  stage  is  not 
that  of  real  life,  and  the  result  of  seeming 
is  achieved  by  means  which,  judged  by 
themselves,  would  seem  to  be  indirect. 
It  is  only  the  raw  recruit  who  tries  to  hit 
the  bull's-eye  by  point-blank  firing,  and 
who  does  not  allow  for  elevation  and 
windage.  Are  we  to  take  it  for  a  mo- 
ment, that  in  the  Art  of  Acting,  of  which 
elocution  is  an  important  part,  nothing  is 
to  be  left  to  the  individual  idea  of  the 
actor  ?  That  he  is  simply  to  declaim  the 
words  set  down  for  him,  without  refer- 
ence to  the  expression  of  his  face,  his 
bearing,  or  his  action  ?  It  is  in  the  union 
196 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

of  all  the  powers — the  harmony  of  gait 
and  utterance  and  emotion — that  convic- 
tion lies.  Garrick,  who  was  the  most 
natural  actor  of  his  time,  could  not  de- 
claim so  well  as  many  of  his  own  mani- 
fest inferiors  in  his  art — nay,  it  was  by 
this  that  he  set  aside  the  old  false  method, 
and  soared  to  the  heights  in  which,  as 
an  artist,  he  reigned  supreme.  Garrick 
personated  and  Kean  personated.  The 
one  had  all  the  grace  and  mastery  of  the 
powers  of  man  for  the  conveyance  of 
ideas,  the  other  had  a  mighty  spirit  which 
could  leap  out  in  flame  to  awe  and  sweep 
the  souls  of  those  who  saw  and  heard 
him.  And  the  secret  of  both  was  that 
they  best  understood  the  poet — best 
impersonated  the  characters  which  he 
drew,  and  the  passions  which  he  set 
forth. 

In  order  to  promote  and  preserve  the 
idea  of  reality  in  the  minds  of  the  public, 
it  is  necessary  that  the  action  of  the  play 

197 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

be  set  in  what  the  painters  call  the  proper 
milieu,  or  atmosphere.  To  this  belongs 
costume,  scenery,  and  all  that  tends  to 
set  forth  time  and  place  other  than  our 
own.  If  this  idea  be  not  kept  in  view 
there  must  be,  or  at  all  events  there  may 
be,  some  disturbing  cause  to  the  mind  of 
the  onlooker.  This  is  all — literally  all — 
that  dramatic  Art  imperatively  demands 
from  the  paint  room,  the  wardrobe,  and 
the  property  shop  ;  and  it  is  because  the 
public  taste  and  knowledge  in  such  mat- 
ters have  grown  that  the  actor  has  to  play 
his  part  with  the  surroundings  and  acces- 
sories which  are  sometimes  pronounced 
to  be  a  weight  or  drag  on  action.  Suita- 
bility is  demanded  in  all  things ;  and  it 
must,  for  instance,  be  apparent  to  all 
that  the  things  suitable  to  a  palace  are 
different  to  those  usual  in  a  hovel.  There 
is  nothing  unsuitable  in  Lear  in  kingly 
raiment  in  the  hovel  in  the  storm,  because 
such  is  here  demanded  by  the  exigencies 
X98 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

of  the  play  :  but  if  Lear  were  to  be  first 
shown  in  such  guise  in  such  a  place  with 
no  explanation  given  of  the  cause,  either 
the  character  or  the  stage-manager  would 
be  simply  taken  for  a  madman.  This 
idea  of  suitability  should  always  be  borne 
in  mind,  for  it  is  in  itself  a  sufficient 
answer  to  any  thoughtless  allegation  as  to 
overloading  a  play  with  scenery. 

Finally,  in  the  consideration  of  the  Art 
of  Acting,  it  must  never  be  forgotten  that 
its  ultimate  aim  is  beauty.  Truth  itself  is 
only  an  element  of  beauty,  and  to  merely 
reproduce  things  vile  and  squalid  and 
mean  is  a  debasement  of  Art.  There  is 
apt  to  be  such  a  tendency  in  an  age  of 
peace,  and  men  should  carefully  watch 
its  manifestations.  A  morose  and  hope- 
less dissatisfaction  is  not  a  part  of  a  true 
national  life.  This  is  hopeful  and  ear- 
nest, and,  if  need  be,  militant.  It  is  a 
bad  sign  for  any  nation  to  yearn  for,  or 
even  to  tolerate,  pessimism  in  its  enjoy- 

199 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

ment  ;  and  how  can  pessimism  be  other 
than  antagonistic  to  beauty  ?  Life,  with 
all  its  pains  and  sorrows,  is  a  beautiful 
and  a  precious  gift ;  and  the  actor's  Art 
is  to  reproduce  this  beautiful  thing,  giving 
due  emphasis  to  those  royal  virtues  and 
those  stormy  passions  which  sway  the 
destinies  of  men.  Thus  the  lesson  given 
by  long  experience — by  the  certain  pun- 
ishment of  ill-doing — and  by  the  rewards 
that  follow  on  bravery,  forbearance,  and 
self-sacrifice,  are  on  the  mimic  stage  con- 
veyed to  men.  And  thus  every  actor 
who  is  more  than  a  mere  machine,  and 
who  has  an  ideal  of  any  kind,  has  a  duty 
which  lies  beyond  the  scope  of  his  per- 
sonal ambition.  His  art  must  be  some- 
thing to  hold  in  reverence  if  he  wishes 
others  to  hold  it  in  esteem.  There  is  noth- 
ing of  chance  about  this  work.  All,  actors 
and  audience  alike,  must  bear  in  mind  that 
the  whole  scheme  of  the  higher  Drama  is 
not  to  be  regarded  as  a  game  in  life  which 

200 


THE     ART     OF     ACTING 

can  be  played  with  varying  success.     Its 

present  intention  may  be  to  interest 

and  amuse,  but  its  deeper  purpose 

is  earnest,  intense,  sincere. 


THE   END. 


20I 


A^o 


9^es~^ 


CENTRAL  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY 
University  of  California,  San  Diego 

DATE  DUE 

JUN  IfilQQ? 

JUN  69  198r 

C139 

UCSD  Libr. 

UC  SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 


A     000  768  529     0 


J 


